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Category: Now Reading

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

Book(s) of The Year, 2022

Morning everyone.  Y’all know the drill: every December I come along and tell you what I’ve read in the world of higher education, let you know the stars and dogs, as well as give out a “book of the year prize”.  Two reminders: first, that I did a summary of my (considerable) reading from the first half of the year back here, and not everything I read is something that came out this year, so “books of the year” aren’t

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December 7, 2022 No Comments

Supply-Side Liberalism and Post-Secondary Education

There is a new intellectual fashion in the United States called Supply-Side Liberalism.  Basically, the idea is that government’s main role is less about managing aggregate demand and more ensuring the cheapest possible supply of goods and services.  In the US, this approach is rapidly emerging as the new centrist consensus, mainly because the sudden return of inflation as a major economic phenomenon means that all the left bromides about the need to use government funding to stimulate aggregate demand

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November 24, 2022 1 Comment

Serving the Community

A few thoughts on serving the community, prompted by the book What’s Public About Public Higher Education by Stephen Gavazzi and Gordon Gee (which is not as good as their 2018 work Land-Grant Universities of the Future but it still contains interesting material). The notion of having a “community” mission is not entirely accepted within higher education.  Certainly, the “land-grant” institutions, which trace their histories back to a moment in time when the American government decided to throw science and

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November 23, 2022 1 Comment

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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