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Category: Now Reading

Summer Book Report 2026

Hi everyone. Summer’s almost here, so this is the final week before the blog goes on hiatus. And that means, of course, that it’s time for the summer higher education book report! Before getting started on the higher education stuff, y’all seem to like my fiction/non-fiction picks, too. As far as non-fiction goes, I found Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao to be both excellent and timely. For those needing background reading for

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June 8, 2026 No Comments

How China Built a Higher Education Superpower

It’s hard to think of a higher education system that has changed more dramatically over the past half-century than China’s. In the space of just two generations, the country’s gone from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution to building one of the world’s largest and most influential university systems, complete with world-class research institutions and mass participation. It’s achieved all this while, at the same time, working with a system and institutional culture that’s quite different from that of most

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May 28, 2026 No Comments

Universities, Colonialism, and Indigenous Knowledge in Australia

Dhoombak Goobgoowana can be translated as “truth-telling” in the Woi Wurrung language of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people from the unceded area now known as Melbourne, Australia. It’s also the name of the recently published two-volume work on Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne. The books are an extraordinary read, not at all your usual institutional history. Made up of dozens of essays by different authors, it’s not so much a corporate history as it is a meditation on

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May 7, 2026 No Comments

Chair to Chancellor: Lessons in Leading Modern Universities

Every Christmas, this blog invites the University of Tennessee’s Robert Kelchen on the show to do his top 10 stories of the year in the United States. One story keeps coming up: who, in their right mind, would want to be a university president these days? What with the financial pressure, the relentless politics, both on campus and dealing with state and federal governments, it’s an absolutely thankless job. Well, today our guest is someone who maybe led the way

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April 30, 2026 No Comments

Higher Education Beyond the Public Good

The last decade or so has seen enormous changes in world politics. It’s also seen some major changes the way governments relate to higher education, particularly in the anglosphere. For many, it’s been a polycrisis on top of a polycrisis – a multi-directional series of attacks on and challenges to the public standing of higher education at the exact moment when the socio-political underpinnings of the entire post-war settlement seems to be crumbling. Sounds like a pretty good subject for a book,

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February 12, 2026 No Comments

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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