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Category: Worldwide PSE

British Innovation Lessons

I’ve been reading David Edgerton’s new book The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, which presents a bracingly contrarian view of Britain’s 20th Century.  It is, I think, particularly intriguing concerning whether the British left actually more nationalist than socialist (a question which I think might also be usefully asked of Canada’s own left).  In the middle of the book, it presents some fascinating information on the mid-century role of science and innovation in the British economy and suggests

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January 30, 2019 1 Comment

Blatant Self-Promotion

I have a book out.  Well, a volume I co-edited anyway, with my colleague Jason Delisle of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC.   It’s called International Perspectives in Higher Education: Balancing Access, Equity and Cost, and it’s available now from Harvard Education Press (if you’re interested in buying it do so direct from Harvard at the link above, because Amazon.ca says delivery takes 1-3 months).    The book’s a slightly eclectic set of essays which touches on topics like student

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January 25, 2019 No Comments

Antipodean Student Organization Struggles

With the Ford government being the first to take aim at compulsory student unionism in Canada (he will not be the last; in Alberta, Jason Kenney’s UCP has a similar policy resolution on its books), it is worth taking a more detailed look at how the move to make fees optional has played out elsewhere.  Specifically, Down Under, where these policy ideas were first put into practice in the under the name “Voluntary Student Unionism” (VSU, in Australia) and “Voluntary

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January 23, 2019 No Comments

Universities and Universal Values

Morning all.  Happy New Year.  Welcome back.  I’m in Southeast Asia this week taking in some sights.  Travel in Asia always makes me think a lot about the ways in which different parts of the world conceive of higher education and the extent to which we both have and haven’t overcome these divisions today. Universities, as we understand them today, are a distinctively European invention.  They first appeared in Mediterranean countries in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, usually under church

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January 7, 2019 2 Comments

Higher Ed Books of 2018

You all know the drill.  I read a bunch of higher ed books every year (not all of them published this year) and then just before XMAS I give you my picks.  Serious higher ed nerds seem to enjoy it, but some of you will want to skip this.  Either way, here we go: Fiction – I mostly read campus novels to satisfy my masochistic streak, because as a genre they are pretty awful (Lucky Jim made me want to tear my

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December 13, 2018 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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