Category: Research

Tenure and Promotion Criteria: You Get What You Ask For

Incentives matter. And all the major extrinsic incentives of university life can be found in documents known as “tenure and promotion criteria” (hereafter TPC). Every institution has a set of these (or indeed often multiple versions of them, since the criteria often vary from one faculty to another. Here’s McGill’s policy. Here is Waterloo’s. Here’s an extremely detailed one produced by the University of British Columbia. They are not exactly the same, but they rhyme. And what’s fascinating is what is not in any of them. Let’s start with research, or as

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Campus Total Defence

This blog doubles as an invitation to a very cool event in Ottawa on March 23rd. See the end of blog for details. If there is anything Canada should take from President Trump’s deeply disturbing rants about Greenland over the past couple of weeks, it is that our country is very definitely a target. The fascist government in power in the United States genuinely believes both that might makes right and that the entire hemisphere is rightfully theirs. The threat to national

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Report Back on the National Defence Research Roundtable

You may recall that back in mid-November – on the back of some discussions that took place at the University Vice-President’s Network meeting in Victoria – HESA launched a call for a meeting in Ottawa focused on: i) how to coordinate and advance defence research in Canada, and ii) developing sector-wide advice on how Canada should structure future defence and security research investments. On December 15th, 77 people showed up in Ottawa to discuss exactly that.  Today, we are releasing National Defence Research

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Monsters in the System: Alex Usher on the Forces Transforming Higher Ed

Hello and welcome back to the World of Higher Education Podcast. I’m your host this week, Tiffany MacLennan. Today, we’re doing something a little bit different. With this podcast, as you know, we look at some of the major stories shaping the higher education sector around the world. This year, that reflection has also taken form, not just as a podcast, but as a written report as well. A global year-end review that examines how politics, demography, finance, and technology

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The World of Higher Education – Year in Review 2025

Morning all. Today, HESA is releasing The World of Higher Education – Year in Review 2025, the first in our to-be-annual series chronicling how the world’s higher education systems have fared over the past twelve months. You can download it here. Despite taking up something on the order of 1% of global GDP and educating 3-4% of the world’s population in any given year, higher education is, perhaps surprisingly, a field where most of the analytical work is resoundingly national

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