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Category: Research

Coronavirus (13) – Virus Federalism

Though the national media has dealt gingerly with the subject, the fact is that this pandemic is playing out very differently across the country.  Ontario and Quebec are still in full-on holy crap mode: the situation is bad, no two ways about it.  Not Italy bad, but bad enough.  But away from Central Canada, it’s a very different story, as this graph from Tuesday’s Globe and Mail shows. Look at BC, where despite proximity to the early outbreak hub of Seattle, new daily cases

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April 8, 2020 No Comments

Problems in International Institutional Typology

As you all know, a reasonable chunk of my work involves making international comparisons.  This is far from simple in higher education because basic units of analysis differ enormously from one country to another.  Whether you are counting students (do doctoral students count, when in some countries they are classified as employees? How do you equivalize student numbers for part-time status, which exists only in some countries?), or staff (how do you equivalize by rank? Do teaching-only staff count? What

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March 26, 2020 1 Comment

(University) Life During Wartime

Since everyone is using war metaphors to describe current efforts against COVID-19, I thought it might be worth taking a trip down memory lane to look at what universities did during the World Wars (colleges, being mostly creatures of the 50s-70s, were not around then, so this is a single-sector survey).  I am not convinced it’s the right metaphor – in Britain, for example, their death-cult instinct makes them treat every crisis like it’s 1940. Because of their refusal to

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March 23, 2020 No Comments

Toxic Colleagues and Academic Freedom

You may remember in the fall of 2018, there was a bit of a brouhaha around a case at Thompson Rivers University concerning a professor named Derek Pyne.  The upshot of the story is that Pyne, a professor of economics, published an article in 2017 (see here) which attracted wide attention, including from The Economist.  Dr. Pyne’s article suggested that the majority of researchers at a small, unnamed Business School – quite transparently the one at TRU where he was employed – published in

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December 11, 2019 3 Comments

Changing Finances of World-Class Universities Part 3

So now we come to the heart of the matter: what’s actually going on in terms of publication outcomes (both the number and the impact)? For the first couple of graphs, I’m going to include the 11 top-200 schools from the People’s Republic of China just for the sheer fun of it (I have China data for research, but not finances). Figure 1 takes shows the increase in research output at top-200 universities, by country, for the years 2014-2017 over

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October 24, 2019 1 Comment

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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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