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Category: Now Reading

The Development of Post-Secondary Education Systems in Canada

This is the title of a recent-ish book (subtitle: a comparison between British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec, 1980-2010) edited, and largely written by Don Fisher and Kjell Rubenson of UBC, Teresa Shanahan of York U, and Claude Trottier of Université Laval.  Despite a couple of significant faults, it’s well worth a read. The book’s main strengths are the three chapters that act as histories of each of the titular provinces.  We haven’t had a really decent history of Canadian higher

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March 31, 2016 No Comments

Asleep at the Switch…

… is the name of a new(ish) book by Bruce Smardon of York University, which looks at the history of federal research & development policies over the last half-century.  It is a book in equal measures fascinating and infuriating, but given that our recent change of government seems to be a time for re-thinking innovation policies, it’s a timely read if nothing else. Let’s start with the irritating.  It’s fairly clear that Smardon is an unreconstructed Marxist (I suppose structuralist is

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January 29, 2016 No Comments

Reports, Books, and CUDO

It’s getting close to that time of year when I need to sign off for the holidays (tomorrow will be the last blog until January 4th).  So before then, I thought it would be worth quickly catching up on a few things. Some reports you may have missed.  A number of reports have come out recently that I have been meaning to review.  Two, I think, are of passing note: i) The Alberta Auditor-general devoted part of his annual report (see pages

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December 10, 2015 2 Comments

A Ministry of Talent

My friend and colleague, Jamie Merisotis of the Lumina Foundation in the United States, recently wrote a book called America Needs Talent.  It’s a short, popularly-oriented account of how human capital drives the economy, and what countries and cities can do to acquire it.  One of the suggestions he makes is for a federal “Department of Talent”, which is intriguing as a thought experiment, if nothing else.  So let’s explore that idea for a moment. To begin, let’s be clear

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November 13, 2015 1 Comment

Amusing Footnotes on Global Academic Pay

A few months back, I finished reading The Global Future of Higher Education and the Academic Profession: The BRICs and the United States (edited by – among others – Phil Altbach and Liz Reisberg). It’s a good book for two reasons: first, it contains pretty good thumbnail sketches of the four BRIC countries’ higher ed systems, and second, it shows how crazy and fragile academics lives are in most of the world. (An aside here: one thing I really like about this book is

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October 22, 2015 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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