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
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
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
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
“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
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.
