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Category: Now Reading

Mid-term Book Reviews 2023

Hi all.  You know the drill.  Every six months I tell you about the higher education books I’ve read this year so you can go to the beach armed with the best in higher education reading. But first, I hear you are interested in some non-higher-ed reading?  That sounds a bit weird to me, but I’ll oblige: My fiction pics for this last few months are The Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous, and The Stolen Bicycle by

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June 13, 2023 1 Comment

Bad Faith Arguments About the Demise of Science

You may have heard about the article “In Defense of Merit and Science” that was rejected by “several prominent mainstream journals” before eventually being published by the newish Journal of Controversial Ideas.  Well, I’ve read the paper and it’s a trash fire of a document which thoroughly deserved every single one of its rejections.  In fact, it is such a trash heap, one suspects that it was submitted to these journals in full knowledge it would be rejected so that the

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May 17, 2023 No Comments

Can Canada Out-think the Underpants Gnomes?

I recently read a fascinating book called “How to Make an Entrepreneurial State: Why Innovation  Needs Bureaucracy “ by Rainer Kattel, Wolfgang Drechsler and Erkki Karo, all of whom are influenced by Marianna Mazucatto, whose work I have discussed here and here.  It’s fascinating for two reasons: first, that the book says next to nothing about how making the state more entrepreneurial or why innovation needs bureaucracy, but it is a very inclusive history of the types innovation policy structures

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March 14, 2023 No Comments

That Bill Morneau Book

I read Where to From Here: A Path To Canadian Prosperity, by former Liberal Finance Minister Bill Morneau, this weekend.  I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone else read it – it is bland, provides almost no new insight into the workings of the Trudeau government, and the “aw shucks can’t we all be more decent and moderate?” shtick gets old fast. But it has an important lesson for the post-secondary education sector.  And that is: the sector counts for nothing in Ottawa

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January 30, 2023 4 Comments

Discovery Slowing?

There has been a lot of chat over the past few days about a paper by three American scholars (Michael Park, Erin Leahey and Russell Funk) published in Nature about the declining rate of innovation in academic science (available here).  The paper is interesting, but the very loud whining that has stemmed from it (see here and here but it was way worse on science twitter, trust me) is mostly pretty nonsensical.  Let me break it down for you. The

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January 10, 2023 4 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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