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The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Politics

Higher Ed at the Ballot Box: Australia’s Election and the Accord with Andrew Norton

It’s been about eighteen months since this podcast last visited Australia. The story at the time was about something called “the Universities Accord”, an oddly-named expert panel report which was supposed to give the Labor government a roadmap for re-structuring a higher education system widely believed to be under enormous stress.  Since then, lots has happened. There’s been an international student visa controversy, a whole ton of cutbacks at institutions (including a quite wild polycrisis at Australian National Universities) and

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September 11, 2025 No Comments

Cut, Coerce, Control: What Trump Is Doing to U.S. Universities

The single biggest story in higher education for the first six months of this year, without a doubt, has been the Trump administration’s remarkable assault on science and universities. Arguably it’s the largest state-led assault on higher education institutions anywhere in the world since Mao and the cultural revolution. Billions of dollars already legally allocated to institutions have been stripped from them mainly, but not exclusively through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Billions more are

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June 5, 2025 No Comments

Code Red on University Autonomy

There is no aspect of university autonomy that is more fundamental – in the British Commonwealth at least — than the right of each institution to select which students it chooses to admit. Along with financial autonomy, staffing autonomy, and financial autonomy (that last one being under increasing pressure these days), the right of institutions to choose which students to teach is fundamental to the Canadian higher education system. At no time in Canadian history has a government ever tried

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June 3, 2025 1 Comment

Last Week in Parliament: Three Takeaways

It was a busy week in Parliament last week.  The King came to Ottawa to deliver a Speech From the Throne.  His speech – almost exclusively a re-hash of Liberal promises from the April election – was deeply depressing for anyone who thinks the words “knowledge economy” have any meaning.    The main feature of the Speech from the Throne was that it spelled out, in excruciating detail, how the Liberals intend to double down on re-creating the Canadian economy

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June 2, 2025 1 Comment

Opportunity and Talent

On the day of the federal election, the Globe came out with a list of eight “fateful issues” that Canada’s next Prime Minister (Mark Carney, as we now know) would have to face. I’ve read it a couple of times now and what strikes me most is not that the list is wrong, per se, but that the framing is so desperately plodding and unimaginative. And we need some serious imagination right now. Let’s get down to specifics here: the eight areas

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May 5, 2025 2 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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