Recently, I asked my Twitter followers who taught in universities about the part of their job they liked the least. I asked because I am pretty convinced Canadian higher education isn’t going to get through the next decade or so without some reasonably big changes in the way faculty spend their time. Here’s my basic assumption: as I noted back here, we’re on the brink of a pretty big increase in youth numbers. The best guess is that the number
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
One of the more interesting higher ed books I’ve read so far this year is Pivot by Mark Lombardi and Joanne Soliday. It’s not a brand-new book – it came out a few months before COVID – but its tales of small institutions transforming themselves (usually) in the face of overwhelming enrolment and financial pressures are still very fresh and reading their stories is worth anyone’s time. The four institutions covered in this book are, with one exception, places few
Alex Usher and Jonathan McQuarrie Today HESA is releasing the fifth edition of our publication Monitoring Trends in Academic Programs, written by Jonathan McQuarrie. This issue is a bit of a departure for MTAP. Unlike previous editions which have focused largely on innovations that occur at the intersections between different fields of study, this one focuses squarely on a single domain of study which is undergoing some serious re-invention; namely, Engineering. What is happening right now in Engineering education is
Just a quick one today because the expanded HESA Towers opened yesterday and there’s been a lot going on. It’s about an experiment that I wish more institutions would undertake, upon building a new university (it has to be a new university, for reasons which I think will be obvious): that is, to allow the institution to offer degrees on any basis it wishes except that of disciplinarity. No history degrees. No physics degrees. Kill disciplinarity, at least as it
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.
