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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

Books of the Year 2025

Exams have started, it’s getting cold, so that means the blog is winding down soon and I have to tell you about all the higher education books I’ve read since summer. Books from January to mid-June can be reviewed here. Buckle up. (Digression: if you want some good non-fiction, I can recommend Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future and Jacques Menard’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, which is a bit of a

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December 9, 2025 No Comments

Book Report Summer 2025

Morning everyone.  The days are getting long, so that means it’s getting close to the time when I need to wrap up this blog for the (northern hemisphere) summer.  And that, in turn, means book report time, where I round up everything I’ve read on higher education for the past six months. (If you’re looking for non-higher education recommendations: Terry David Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union 1923-1939 will re-wire your thinking about what the early

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June 9, 2025 1 Comment

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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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