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Category: Politics

False Charges of Austerity

A few weeks ago, Jamie Brownlee (who I believe is a graduate student at Carleton University) published a piece in Academic Matters (available here) in which he developed a two-part notion.  First, he argued that universities had become “corporatized”, and second, he believes that governments played a big role in this by de-funding universities through austerity.  I will deal with the corporatization argument tomorrow; today, what I want to do is demolish the idea that universities have been subject to austerity

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February 10, 2016 2 Comments

The Dilemma of Western Education in Saudi Arabia

I see that Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne recently took offense to the fact that Algonquin College is operating a male-only vocational college in Jazan, Saudi Arabia, calling the arrangement “unacceptable”. What should we make of this? First of all, let’s be clear about women and higher education in Saudi Arabia.  There are a lot of them; in fact, far more women attend post-secondary education than men in the country.  They just don’t – for the most part – attend the

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February 5, 2016 2 Comments

Canadian PMs’ Higher Education Experiences

For giggles the other night, I started looking up the educational backgrounds of various countries’ heads of government.  I’ll do the other countries tomorrow; today, I thought I’d start with Canada.  Let’s do it by the numbers. One: The number of Canadian PMs who have held PhDs.  It was McKenzie King, who earned a PhD from Harvard for his dissertation on “Oriental Immigration to Canada”. He was against it: “Canada should remain a country for the white man”, he wrote with

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November 30, 2015 5 Comments

The Radical Implications of David Turpin’s Installation Speech

David Turpin was installed as President at the University of Alberta earlier this week.  His inaugural speech was good.  Very good.  Read a shortened version of it here. (Full disclosure: I spoke at a leadership function at the University of Alberta in August, for which I received a fee.  The University has also recently purchased two of our syndicated research products.  Make of that what you wish.) The speech starts out with what I would call some standard defences of the university, which any

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November 18, 2015 7 Comments

A Ministry of Talent

My friend and colleague, Jamie Merisotis of the Lumina Foundation in the United States, recently wrote a book called America Needs Talent.  It’s a short, popularly-oriented account of how human capital drives the economy, and what countries and cities can do to acquire it.  One of the suggestions he makes is for a federal “Department of Talent”, which is intriguing as a thought experiment, if nothing else.  So let’s explore that idea for a moment. To begin, let’s be clear

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November 13, 2015 1 Comment

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