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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

Study Gods and Leading Universities

Morning all.  There are two recent books of note I want to highlight: Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition by Yi-Lin Chiang, and Empire of Ideas: Creating the Modern University System from Germany to American to China by William C. Kirby. Study Gods is basically an ethnography of students at a couple of “top” high schools in the Beijing area.  It follows a number of students – both successful and unsuccessful – from early in

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November 17, 2022 1 Comment

University Governance in Canada

If you’ve been in any senior university administrator’s offices in the last few weeks, there’s a good chance you’ll have seen a paperback with vaguely constructivist art cover entitled University Governance in Canada: Navigating Complexity by the scholarly quartet of Julia Eastman, Glen Jones, Claude Trottier and Olivier Bégin-Caouette.  Within administrative circles, it’s getting a lot of buzz and praise for being an accurate portrait of the state of Canadian higher education in the early 2020s.  On balance, I think

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October 6, 2022 No Comments

Viewpoint Diversity

Last week, the MacDonald-Laurier Institute released a truly bad paper on “viewpoint diversity” at Canadian Universities.  How bad was it, you ask?  Really bad.  Icelandic rotting shark bad.  Crystal Pepsi bad.  Final Season of Game of Thrones bad.  The basic thrust of the paper, co-written by Christopher Dummitt and Zachary Patterson, is that The Canadian professoriate is well to the left of the Canadian public Within the academy, those who describe themselves as being on the right are much more

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September 22, 2022 2 Comments

The Decline of American Higher Education

As recently as five years ago, Americans were generally pretty proud of their higher education system.  Sure, there were complaints, but even when the criticisms were more systemic, they were usually prefaced by the words “we’ve got the best system in the world, but…” It occurred to me the other day that I hadn’t heard that phrase in a while, and not just because COVID has reduced the frequency of my jaunts to DC, where I most often heard it. 

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September 15, 2022 No 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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