So, it’s that time of year when I say farewell to faithful readers for a few months. This is the last blog of the academic year. Normal service will resume August 30th. Today also marks the end of this blog’s tenth year. Which, you know, is a bit terrifying. Because that means this blog is probably over a million words old. I’m sure my mother would have preferred I spent all that time on a doctorate. (You should think about
Agriculture faculties often sit oddly within the modern university. I mean this literally in the sense that they are usually off at one end of campus or in some cases several tens of kilometres away from it. Despite strong roots (heh) in the biological sciences, they get treated as separate entities for reasons that aren’t really evident from a scientific point of view. The rough analogy from the physical sciences is computer science, which, like agriculture, has a pretty high
One of the fastest ways to get into an argument at a university is to suggest that there is some necessary trade-off between research and teaching. Really. The words will hardly be out of our mouth before someone comes charging at you, claiming the opposite. It’s not an empirical argument or anything, but an article of faith. Frankly, you wouldn’t want it to be an empirically testable position because if it was, someone might start asking some pretty difficult questions.
On the off chance you’re wandering through the halls of academia (non-COVID halls, anyway) and feel like picking a fight with another wanderer, the best advice I can give you is to use these three words: “students” “are” “customers”. See? Half of you probably want to fight me right now. But what I want to argue today is that while there are circumstances where that three-word statement is untrue, for the most part it is not untrue in the way
A few weeks ago, Statistics Canada released a paper profiling graduates of community colleges who already held bachelor’s degrees. A significant number of these were graduates of foreign universities – immigrants who came to the country with a degree and then found they needed a Canadian credential. But there were also a substantial number – fully 8% of all college graduates – who already had a degree from a Canadian university. In the 1990s, when colleges first started pointing out this
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.
