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Category: Research

Four Thoughts from Nairobi

I was in Kenya a couple of weeks ago for the THE Africa Summit on Higher Education. Although I worked a lot in Africa in the 2010s, this was my first trip back since COVID, and wow have things changed. I thought I would remark on four aspects of the trip. First, I am glad I read Joe Studwell’s How Africa Works—a book that suggests that Africa is getting close to take-off because of its growing population density—before getting there, because Nairobi

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April 15, 2026 No Comments

Branch Campuses, Fake Research, and the Future of Indian Universities

India’s higher education sector is in a permanent state of flux. There’s constant friction between the federal government and the states, as well as ongoing rivalry between a centralized public system and a dynamic private one. In the background, there’s a society that is deeply unequal and riven with discrimination, especially on the basis of caste. And all of this is happening in a country which, despite healthy growth since the turn of the century, is still poor, and where

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April 2, 2026 No Comments

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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February 4, 2026 3 Comments

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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January 26, 2026 2 Comments

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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January 14, 2026 1 Comment

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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