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Category: Worldwide PSE

The Northern Ontario School of Medicine

I have been getting emails soliciting my option about the Government of Ontario’s decision to make the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) a stand-alone university.  This is a big issue in Northern Ontario, with many people getting upset over what I think amounts to very little.  But perhaps we should rewind to the beginning. NOSM is a fairly unique medical school.  It was created in the mid-2000s to deal with a persistent shortage of doctors in Northern Ontario.  In

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April 27, 2021 2 Comments

Taking Your Marbles and Going Home

A couple of years ago in a blog post I noted a tendency among western academics to assume that the Western view of the university was the only possible one, and specifically that universities which existed in illiberal or autocratic settings were not “real” universities.   At the time, I said: There are other university traditions, not all of which require liberal democracy to flourish: Lord knows the continual ascent of Tsinghua, National University of Singapore and others in international rankings is

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April 26, 2021 1 Comment

Amateur Hour

This week, in between negotiating computer crashes, dealing with angry university finance people and the usual grind, I managed to read a new book on the history of university teaching in the United States called The Amateur Hour by Jonathan Zimmerman.  It is pretty innovative in its way: there are histories of higher education in abundance, but most of them end up being histories of institutions (or institutional types), or sociological histories of the student body, or whatever: focussing on what was

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February 11, 2021 No Comments

Two Short Notes About China

Hi all.  Short blogs for the next couple of days because HESA Towers is hopping and I’m really up against it for time. So just a couple of bite-size pieces today. Tsinghua in Trouble Once upon a time, if you wanted to point to how universities in China were driving economic growth, you’d point to Tsinghua University and specifically Tsinghua Holdings, which was a conglomerate made up of all the spin-off businesses which came out of “China’s MIT.”  Tsinghua Holdings is simply massive

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January 26, 2021 No Comments

46

At noon eastern today, Joe Biden will take the Oath of Office and become the 46th President of the United States.  The Pumpkin Fascist may be out of our hair, at least for awhile, what with the pending bankruptcy, sexual assault charges, tax, bank and real estate fraud charges, the emoluments case, plus whatever charges he will face for his role in the Cosplay March on Rome earlier this month.  But the country still faces the task of getting out of

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January 20, 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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