Category: Uncategorized

What We Do and Why We Do It

After fifteen years of writing this blog, I pause and look back every now and then at those first posts. Back then, it was just me writing about a sector I had already spent much of my career working in, sharing whatever I thought might help people stay informed, provoked, or at least amused before their first coffee of the day. Over time, I have come to realise that a surprising number of people assume my job is simply writing

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Ono’s Arc

When Santa Ono first showed up at UBC in 2016, the general reaction was one of mild bemusement—or, more specifically, a feeling of “who dat?” Although Ono is Canadian by origin (born in Vancouver), he grew up and spent more or less his entire career in the United States, apart from taking his doctorate in experimental Medicine at McGill. His last job before coming north was as president of the University of Cincinnati, which is a decent school with a

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Announcing Re:University

So, I have a bit of an announcement to make today. I hope you’ll find it at least modestly intriguing. In a year with no shortage of bleak higher education stories, one of the big questions we’ve been asking this year is: how do institutions actually recover? Not in the vague, inspirational sense, but in the real-world, practical, hard-choices-on-the-table kind of way. That’s what our Recovery Project has been all about. Drawing on past periods of retrenchment, we’ve been learning what it

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The Fifteen: March 7, 2025

Welcome back to another issue of The Fifteen. Read stories from expanding higher education markets like Egypt, India, and Nigeria, as well as from ones facing some different challenges, such as Lithuania, Korea and Italy, plus: important news out of the increasingly beleaguered American higher education sector. Happy reading. 1. In 2008, the Lumina Foundation set a goal of 60% attainment rate for post-secondary education in the US by 2025. Today 55% of American adults hold some type of higher-ed

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Save the Date: HESA’s AI-CADEMY Summit

Hi everyone, Hope you are all having a great summer. Just wanted to drop a line to let you know about a big new HESA initiative.   As you may know, over the past year, HESA has been maintaining an Observatory on AI Policies in Canadian Post-Secondary Education and hosting regular Roundtables on the same topic. Even if we’re skeptical that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is anywhere near the horizon (count me with Gary Marcus on this one), it’s quite clear that

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