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Category: Now Reading

The Mid-2022 Reading Review

I know every single one of you blog readers brings higher ed literature to the beach, and so – since we are approaching the end of the blog season – it’s time for a reading round-up to help you fill out your summer reading list. I’ve been reading fewer institutional histories than usual.  There was The University of New Zealand by Hugh Parton, a history of higher education in New Zealand up to about 1960, when the country had four campuses but

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June 8, 2022 No Comments

Pivot

One of the more interesting higher ed books I’ve read so far this year is Pivot by Mark Lombardi and Joanne Soliday.  It’s not a brand-new book – it came out a few months before COVID – but its tales of small institutions transforming themselves (usually) in the face of overwhelming enrolment and financial pressures are still very fresh and reading their stories is worth anyone’s time. The four institutions covered in this book are, with one exception, places few

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May 16, 2022 2 Comments

Campus Unrest and Public Funding: Then and Now

If you’ve been watching the American higher education scene for the last couple of years, you will no doubt have noticed a spate of bills wending their way through various state legislatures that are widely understood as attacks on higher education.  These include bills weakening tenure, bills making it effectively illegal to teach American history (lest White students feel guilty about the actions of their ancestors), or the defunding of courses on programs on gender or women’s studies.  The narrative

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April 5, 2022 1 Comment

The Opposition to Micro-credentials

Following yesterday’s piece on developments in micro-credentials, I want to address what I see as the back-lash against them.  I see theoretical and the practical objections emerging. The theoretical charge against micro-credentials is led by OISE’s Leesa Wheelahan and Gavin Moodie, who recently penned Gig qualifications for the gig economy: micro-credentials and the ‘hungry mile’ in the journal Higher Education.  As the catchy title suggests, it does not mince words.  According to them, micro-credentials: “contribute to the privatisation of education

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February 16, 2022 1 Comment

How Big Consulting thinks about Higher Education

A couple of weeks ago, David Kernohan at WonkHE, wrote a wonderfully cutting little piece about a new Ernst & Young report calling for a “fundamental re-think” of higher education, and how it seemed to rely on millenarian scenarios in order to sell what was actually a fairly modest call for institutions to maybe improve their IT capabilities.  It inspired me to think a bit more about how the rest of the big consulting groups – Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst &

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February 7, 2022 5 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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