Category: Politics

Reconstruction?

Something on a lot of people’s minds in higher education– at least, among the more internationally-minded types – is how higher education institutions in North America and Europe can contribute to the rebuilding of Ukrainian higher education.  North American responses to the Ukraine crisis have mostly about sheltering individuals and – in the short-term – providing access to higher education at concessionary rates.  But over in Europe, more attention is being paid to helping institutions survive and rebuild.  The European

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Crowding Out

In previous blogs, I discussed how Canadian colleges and universities are generating bad vibes by exacerbating various housing crises.  This has been bad for pretty much the entire sector.  These strategies have contributed to the impression that the leaders of our post-secondary sector are putting their own institutional interests ahead of the communities they inhabit.  It’s not a good look, but for the moment, I think it is survivable from a credibility/responsible neighbour point of view, if only because federal

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Canada’s First National Minister of Higher Education

Last Friday’s, Marc Miller, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Canadian Citizenship (IRCC), announced three changes to the International Student Visa program (link here).  You may have seen a small news alert about it (see here or here).  But it seems that almost nobody caught the full import of the announcement.  The announcement started out ok, with Miller again swatting down rumours of a cap on international student visas and comparing the idea to “performing surgery with a hammer”.  Miller

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Accepting Failure and Trying Something New

If there is one thing that drives me to despair about Canadian universities these days, it is how poor many federal government relations (GR) strategies are.   I can boil the issues down to three specific aspects. Too many cooks.  30 years ago, I am fairly sure no university in Canada had a permanent independent GR presence in Ottawa (apart from the two schools located there).  Now there are a couple of dozen who do.  Much of what they are trying

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That Big Quebec Policy Announcement

Many of you will have seen the stories on Friday concerning a set of policy changes aimed at reducing the number of non-permanent anglophone residents studying in Quebec (see La Presse, The Gazette).  The initial stories were not quite accurate in the sense that what the Government of Quebec announced in this stunningly unhelpful media release did not overtly single out anglophone institutions: they just in practice impact anglophone universities far more than francophone ones.  And what was announced on

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