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Category: Research

Cutting the BS on Teaching and Research

Sometimes people ask me: “what would I change in higher education, if I could”? My answer varies, but right now my fondest wish is for everyone to just cut the BS around the teaching/research balance. Whenever a debate on teaching and research starts, there’s always people who either intimate how “unfortunate” it is that we have to talk about trade-offs, or people who claim that any deviation from the current trade-off means the death of the academic.  But this is

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September 18, 2013 6 Comments

The Opposite of Strategy

The London Free Press recently published a summary of Western’s new draft strategic plan (there’s a longer version on Western’s website, but it’s password protected).  I urge you to read it.  It’s not uniquely bad by any means – there are lots of other institutions who have published similar sorts of documents – but it nevertheless represents a kind of quintessence of what’s wrong with university strategic plans.  It is a Stepford Wife of a strategy.  Nothing about it says, “Western”.  You

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August 28, 2013 6 Comments

Bad Arguments for Basic Research

Last week’s announcement that the NRC was “open for business” has, if nothing else, revealed how shockingly weak most of the arguments are in favour of “basic” research. Opponents of the NRC move have basically taken one of two rhetorical tacks.  The first is to present the switch in NRC mandate as the equivalent of the government abandoning basic science.  This is a bit off, frankly, considering that the government spends billions of dollars on SSHRC, NSERC, CIHR, etc.  Even

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May 22, 2013 4 Comments

Fundamental Research

“Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value” (John McDougall, NRC president, yesterday). “Discovery comes from what scientists think is important, not what industry thinks is important.  Fundamental scientific advancement drives innovation, and that is driven by basic research.” (David Robinson, CAUT Associate Executive Director, yesterday). Some days, the level of discourse in Canadian higher education policy seems to be improving.  Other days, like yesterday, it is full of childish, one-dimensional arguments about the nature of science and

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May 8, 2013 1 Comment

The Leiden Rankings 2013

Though it was passed over in silence here in Canada, the new Leiden university research rankings made a bit of a splash elsewhere, last week.  I gave a brief overview of the Leiden rankings last year.  Based on five years’ worth of Web of Science publication and citation data (2008-2012), it is by some distance the best way to compare institutions’ current research output and performance.  The Leiden rankings have always allowed comparisons along a number of dimensions of impact and

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April 25, 2013 No Comments

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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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