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Higher Education in Federal Countries

Maybe the most childish thing about Canadian higher education policy debates is the recurring insistence on the part of some English Canadians that higher education needs to be more of a federal responsibility (i.e. the central government needs to take a more active role).  If you exclude the motivated reasoning of Ottawa-based higher ed groups who want more things to happen in Ottawa so that they themselves can have more interesting things to do, this position is mostly born of

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March 8, 2019 1 Comment

What is Stefan Collini For?

If you follow UK higher education at all you’ve almost certainly come across the writing of Stefan Collini, most likely in the Guardian or the London Review of Books.  He’s not a higher education specialist (as he frequently disclaims in his work); rather, he is a professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at Cambridge who happens to have developed a rather impressive sideline in writing wry, droll, heartfelt critiques of UK higher education policy. I find him as annoying as all hell.  My

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February 15, 2019 2 Comments

Pathways to Reform

There is a small sub-genre of higher education books that I call “University Procedurals.” The are microscopically detailed accounts detailing how institution X accomplished Y in mind-numbing committee-meeting-by-committee-meeting detail.  A good example of this genre is Mary Emison’s Degrees for a New Generation, which details the emergence of a new curriculum at the University of Melbourne in the mid-2000s, which I detailed back here.  Alexandra Logue, the former Provost of the City University of New York, has now written what may be

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February 1, 2019 1 Comment

British Innovation Lessons

I’ve been reading David Edgerton’s new book The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, which presents a bracingly contrarian view of Britain’s 20th Century.  It is, I think, particularly intriguing concerning whether the British left actually more nationalist than socialist (a question which I think might also be usefully asked of Canada’s own left).  In the middle of the book, it presents some fascinating information on the mid-century role of science and innovation in the British economy and suggests

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January 30, 2019 1 Comment

A New U

When it comes to education and the labour market, universities (well, the bits outside the professional schools, anyway) like to say they are in the business of preparing students not for their first job but for their fifth, or (more grandiosely), “preparing them for life”.  There are some powerful reasons for and assumptions behind that statement, and on the whole this view has served universities and their graduates well over the past few centuries.  But in a world where experience

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January 11, 2019 No 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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