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Category: Research

African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA)

When it comes to higher education, Africa is in a dilemma.  On the one hand, there are enormous pressures to expand access to higher education, ever more so since most countries introduced Universal Secondary Education twenty years ago.  On the other hand, the resources available to satisfy this demand – either public or private – are extremely limited.  What gets sacrificed?   Too often, it is universities’ research missions, where the payout is both long-term and uncertain. But that is hardly

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October 12, 2023 1 Comment

Quid Pro Quo

The last federal budget was, as I noted at the time, a freaking disaster for post-secondary education, and a vivid warning to Government Relations that the arguments that the system – well, universities anyway – had hitherto relied upon were simply not working anymore and that a re-think was required.  Judging by the twitter convos I keep an eye on, I think this lesson is starting to penetrate, in the sense that people are recognizing that simply pointing at Israel

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May 29, 2023 3 Comments

Bad Faith Arguments About the Demise of Science

You may have heard about the article “In Defense of Merit and Science” that was rejected by “several prominent mainstream journals” before eventually being published by the newish Journal of Controversial Ideas.  Well, I’ve read the paper and it’s a trash fire of a document which thoroughly deserved every single one of its rejections.  In fact, it is such a trash heap, one suspects that it was submitted to these journals in full knowledge it would be rejected so that the

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May 17, 2023 No Comments

The World’s Rising Scientific Research Nations

I was sitting at home this weekend, reading the UNESCO World Science Report (2021), as one does, when I started poking around with the actual bibliometric numbers.  And damned if there weren’t some big surprises in there.  First: what is the UNESCO World Science Report?  Well, it’s a pretty interesting document which has appeared periodically since 1993.  Over time, the document has become longer and more complicated.  And for the last few editions, it has produced some statistical annexes examining

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May 16, 2023 1 Comment

Research Re-shuffle

The Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System released its report last week while I was playing boulevardier in Tokyo with Little Miss Sumo (somehow, I’d never really noticed what an enormous fraction of the city’s economy and real estate is devoted to cube toys and claw machines).  It’s more interesting than the usual Ottawa report, and not just because of the murky politics. The report begins with a problematique wheremost of the space was devoted to telling the

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March 27, 2023 1 Comment

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.

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