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Category: Research

Budgets, Control, Incentives, Rankings

Hi everyone.  Just a quick one today, an incomplete follow-up to Tuesday’s blog on rankings. One of the points I made on Tuesday was that several universities – and specifically, nearly all of the Australian ones apart from ANU – have made enormous strides in the rankings over the past 20 years, and this had been done largely in the absence of any funding boost.  A few of you were quick to point out that in fact there has been

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January 27, 2023 No Comments

Discovery Slowing?

There has been a lot of chat over the past few days about a paper by three American scholars (Michael Park, Erin Leahey and Russell Funk) published in Nature about the declining rate of innovation in academic science (available here).  The paper is interesting, but the very loud whining that has stemmed from it (see here and here but it was way worse on science twitter, trust me) is mostly pretty nonsensical.  Let me break it down for you. The

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January 10, 2023 4 Comments

The Meaning of Applied Research

Time was – say, for the thirty years or so after Vannevar Bush wrote Science: The Endless Frontier – everyone had a pretty good understanding of what was meant by the term “research”.  Basically, it was the stuff that pointy-headed people did in labs and was the opposite of “development”. Figure 1: Ancient Understanding of Research But then, people on the development end got a bit snippy.  They, too, did research, it just had a more focused sense of practical

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September 20, 2022 No Comments

The Impact of Impact

Over the past 24-36 months, we’ve seen a real shift towards talking about universities in terms of community benefit/impact rather than in terms of their scientific output.  No more valorization based on silly bibliometrics!  Valorization rather on….well, what exactly? The thing about the whole publish-or-perish thing is that it had created some reasonably fair and equitable standards.  These standards varied from place-to-place, and in some places, they went overboard in being overly-rigid on pure publication metrics, but basically people were

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November 23, 2021 3 Comments

Interpreting the Manifesto Commitments

Morning all.  Today’s the day where I try to sum up and compare what the various parties are promising in different areas and what that likely means for the sector.  For greater detail on individual party platforms for PSE, you may wish to consult the previous analyses: Conservative, NDP, Liberal and Green. Let’s start with the issue of transfers to provinces.  In previous years, but particularly in the two decades following the major cutbacks embedded in the Liberal government’s 1995

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September 16, 2021 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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