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Category: Research

Two Short Notes About China

Hi all.  Short blogs for the next couple of days because HESA Towers is hopping and I’m really up against it for time. So just a couple of bite-size pieces today. Tsinghua in Trouble Once upon a time, if you wanted to point to how universities in China were driving economic growth, you’d point to Tsinghua University and specifically Tsinghua Holdings, which was a conglomerate made up of all the spin-off businesses which came out of “China’s MIT.”  Tsinghua Holdings is simply massive

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January 26, 2021 No Comments

46

At noon eastern today, Joe Biden will take the Oath of Office and become the 46th President of the United States.  The Pumpkin Fascist may be out of our hair, at least for awhile, what with the pending bankruptcy, sexual assault charges, tax, bank and real estate fraud charges, the emoluments case, plus whatever charges he will face for his role in the Cosplay March on Rome earlier this month.  But the country still faces the task of getting out of

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January 20, 2021 No Comments

Whales

One of the weirdest thing about Canadian tech policy (insofar as we have one) is the obsession with Canadian “champions”.   Whenever a promising company – say Verafin, or Element AI – gets sold to a foreign (mainly American) buyer, there is always much wailing and gnashing of teeth about Canada being “unable to compete”.    The idea seems to be that unless we have big behemoth players striding the globe, we are not a serious tech country.  It’s not entirely clear why competitiveness should

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January 6, 2021 3 Comments

When Science Outruns Business

I have a few projects where I keep seeing the same problem again and again.  And it’s a real poser because it’s a problem that the literature on knowledge and economic development mostly passes over.  It goes like this: Universities play an important role in local economies for two reasons.  The first is that they provide a stream of talented graduates which, in theory, acts as a honeytrap for capital.  The second is that the flow of information between institutions

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December 8, 2020 1 Comment

How Not to Write About a Pandemic

So, I think I have found what is definitively the worst possible take on COVID-19 and universities.  It is called: “The Academy’s Neoliberal Response to COVID-19: Why We Should Be Wary and Why We Should Push Back”, by St. Jerome’s University’s Honor Brabazon and it was published by Academic Matters, the house organ of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (a shorter version also was published by CAUT). Do read it because it’s a classic of academic narcissism: 100%

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June 8, 2020 9 Comments

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