The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Research

Non-Lieux Universities: Whose Fault?

About four months ago, UBC President Stephen Toope wrote a widely-praised piece called “Universities in an Era of Non-Lieux“.  Basically, the piece laments the growing trend toward the deracinated homogenization of universities around the globe.  He names global rankings and government micro-management of research and enrolment strategies – usually of a fairly faddish variety, as evidenced by the recent MOOC-mania – as the main culprits. I’m not going to take issue with Toope’s central thesis: I agree with him 100% that

Read More »
May 12, 2014 No Comments

International Alliances and Research Agreements

In business, companies strive to increase market share; in higher education, institutions compete for prestige.  This is why, despite whatever your told by people in universities, rankings are catnip to university administrations: by codifying prestige, they give institutions actual benchmarks against which they can measure themselves. But prestige is actually much harder to amass than market share.  Markets can increase in size; prestige is a zero-sum affair (my prestige is related directly to your lack thereof).  And universities have fewer

Read More »
November 7, 2013 2 Comments

Owning the Podium

I’m sure many of you saw Western President, Amit Chakma’s, op-ed in the National Post last week, suggesting that Canadian universities need more government assistance to reach new heights of excellence, and “own the podium” in global academia.  I’ve been told that Chakma’s op-ed presages a new push by the U-15 for a dedicated set of “excellence funds” which, presumably, would end up mostly in the U-15’s own hands (for what is excellence if not research done by the U-15?).  All I can

Read More »
November 5, 2013 2 Comments

A New Study on Postdocs

There’s an interesting study on postdocs out today, from the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars (CAPS) and MITACS.  The report provides a wealth of data on postdocs’ demographics, financial status, likes, dislikes, etc.  It’s all thoroughly interesting and well worth a read, but I’m going to restrict my comments to just two of the most interesting results. The first has to do, specifically, with postdocs’ legal status.  In Quebec, they are considered students. Outside Quebec, it depends: if their funding comes

Read More »
October 2, 2013 No Comments

Revisiting BS

Seems I hit a nerve last week when I wrote about Teaching v. Research. Between the emails and the twitter chat afterwards, I can safely say I’ve never received as much feedback on a piece as I did on that one.  As a result, I thought I should respond to a few of the key lines of discussion. Interestingly, few critics seemed to have picked up on the fact that I was attacking the hypocrisy and sanctimony around the teaching/research

Read More »
September 23, 2013 No Comments

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...