It’s now midnight eastern time and it’s looking more and more like we are not going to know who won the U.S. election until later today or perhaps even late this week (Pennsylvania probably will not report fully until Friday). But it’s not too late to take a few moments to take a good look at the damage done to American higher education over the past four years, and where the system might be headed next. In some ways the
There has been some brouhaha in Ontario about Canada Christian College (CCC), an evangelical school in Whitby, being given the title “university” and being “allowed to offer degrees”. There is both less and more to this story than meets the eye. Allow me to walk you through it. Let’s start at the beginning: when does a university become a university and who gets to grant degrees in Ontario? Well, until 2000, you needed an Act of the Legislature. CCC received
Y’all know I usually do a full blog on manifestos for every provincial election. And we have two of those coming up – BC on Saturday and Saskatchewan on Monday – so it seemed natural to publish these two today and tomorrow. But for reasons which will shortly become apparent, I decided to combine them into one. Both elections speak to bigger issues at play that need attention. Let’s start in Saskatchewan, where the right-of-centre Saskatchewan Party (SP) looks poised
Yesterday, we discussed whether a university can have too many faculties (answer: yes, but just try reducing them and see how far you get). Today, I thought I would ask a similar question about universities. It’s a familiar problem in many parts of Canada. In Nova Scotia, arguments about whether there are “too many” institutions have been going on for almost a century. Fifteen years ago, significant parts of BC went a bit bananas when the provincial government decided to
Last week, the Governor-General delivered the Speech From the Throne (SFT). I argue it is a very ominous document for post-secondary education. Since March, the Government of Canada has spent about $250 billion on various types of direct and indirect support for Canadians. Very roughly, a third of that went to the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), other third went to the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS), and the balance went through three or four dozen targeted programs, among the largest of which
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