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Category: Now Reading

Middle Country Problems, Big Country Solutions

Only three countries have ever sent spacecraft to the Moon, and only one has ever had set humans afoot on it.  “Moonshots”, by definition, are things for big countries with big budgets. So why in the hell do so many folks now want to talk about Canada engaging in “moonshots”?  It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how countries like Canada can best engage in innovation, science and technology: an importation of big country ideas into a context of a smaller country

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January 25, 2022 1 Comment

Kota Factory > The Chair

Some – most? – of you probably watched The Chair on Netflix last term (for the uninitiated, it’s Sandra Oh playing Ji-Yoon Kim as she runs an English Department at what appears to be a bottom-of-the-top-tier liberal Arts College in the US Northeast).  Reaction to the show was justifiably mixed: it got a few important things right about academia, but it did so in an irritatingly unrepresentative setting – my kingdom for a campus drama not set at a private

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January 13, 2022 No Comments

Book of the Year

Normally, I end the year with a “Higher Education Book of the Year” recommendation.  It’s not quite the end of the blogging year – that’ll be a week today –  but a) I’m barely reading anymore because of how busy things are at HESA Towers (we’re hiring new management positions, do check out the posting here) and b) I just finished what is evidently gong to be book of the year, so no reason to keep looking.  So here we are. (Quick reminder

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December 2, 2021 2 Comments

Don’t Mention the Monsters

Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History is a useful (if lengthy) book if for whatever reason you are thinking about going into a strategic planning process.  It traces the history of the concept of strategy through its initial application in the military, then through politics, and eventually – post World War II – into the world of business.  Along the way it continually asks the question “what is strategy, anyway”, before eventually landing on a definition which is basically around leveraging strengths to

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October 25, 2021 2 Comments

A Reading List

It’s the next-to-last blog of the academic year and that means it’s time for a quick review of books to read over the summer.  It’s a bit shorter than usual because I’ve been writing a fair bit about books these last few months, but we’ll give it a whirl. One book all higher education afficionados should read is The Low-Density University byEdward Maloney and Joshua Kim.  Not because it is particularly good or relevant, but because it perfectly captures the Spring of 2020 and

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June 16, 2021 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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