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Category: Now Reading

The Canadian Intangibles Agenda

A few months ago, the Public Policy Forum released an intriguing paper by Robert Asselin and Sean Speer called A New North Star: Canadian Competitiveness in an Intangibles Economy.  For various reasons, I never quite got round to reviewing it at the time, but it’s worth examining because once we get over superclusters (please, let’s all get over superclusters), the country is going to be looking for some new organizing framework for innovation and growth policy. I suspect that this “intangibles”

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November 12, 2019 No Comments

Light Weekend Reading

It’s Friday, so I thought I’d skip the heavy stuff and lay out some quick notes on my recent higher ed reads. I’ve been trying to read more about the history of Canadian institutions.  One very short pamphlet-like read is called Hatching the Cowbird’s Egg by David R. Murray, about the origin of the University of Guelph (the title vaguely make sense if you read the whole book; in context it’s a reference to the fact that Guelph is a weirdly

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November 8, 2019 1 Comment

Superstar Theory and Why Higher Education is Different

I spent part of this weekend reading Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life, by the late Princeton Economist Alan Krueger (whose work on higher education I highlighted here when he died by suicide earlier this year).  It’s not a bad little book, part inside-baseball on the music industry, part using examples from the music industry to explain certain features of the wider economy.  But one chapter in particular got me thinking

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November 4, 2019 1 Comment

Summer Book Report

I read a few books over the summer. Below, a few quick summaries: University of Nike: How Corporate Cash Bought American Higher Education by Melville House. Every year, there’s a new book about how college sports corrupt American universities. They are all true. As a genre, however, they get old fast. This book does the usual, looking at the relationship between the University of Oregon and the sportswear company Nike. It’s not a bad book concerning the University of Oregon,

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August 30, 2019 No Comments

From the Shelves of HESA Towers (II)

To continue with the occasional post on random books on the shelves at HESA Towers, today I want to talk about this book pictured below.  It doesn’t look like much, but it’s one of the most intriguing things kicking around the office.  It dates from the summer of 1967 and is called “The Gourman Report” Most histories of university rankings will tell you that the first commercial ranking of undergraduate institutions was in a 1983 edition of US News &

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May 1, 2019 2 Comments

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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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