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Tag: Faculty

Pathways to Reform

There is a small sub-genre of higher education books that I call “University Procedurals.” The are microscopically detailed accounts detailing how institution X accomplished Y in mind-numbing committee-meeting-by-committee-meeting detail.  A good example of this genre is Mary Emison’s Degrees for a New Generation, which details the emergence of a new curriculum at the University of Melbourne in the mid-2000s, which I detailed back here.  Alexandra Logue, the former Provost of the City University of New York, has now written what may be

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February 1, 2019 1 Comment

The STEM-Arts Reversal, Part III

So, on Monday, I showed how Ontario universities are changing their enrolment patterns in response to changing demand and what we saw was that over the period 2009-2016, enrolments in Arts stayed flat while enrolments in STEM rose by nearly 40%. But the question is: how have staff complements changed in order to deal with this?  To answer this, I tried to look at changes in staff complements at the same nine universities.  Unfortunately, Brock does not provide data on

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March 21, 2018 4 Comments

A Suspect Report About Precarity

About a month ago, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives put out a report on precarious employment in Ontario universities and colleges. One good thing about this document at the outset: it has an imaginative research design.  There is so much we do not know, and in the absence of any detailed reporting by institutions themselves cannot know about employment in post-secondary institutions.  To get around this, the report’s authors, Erika Shaker and Robin Shaban, gather data from the Labour Force Survey,

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March 12, 2018 1 Comment

Mind-blowing Ontario Academic Staffing Data (Part 2)

Today I want to go back to that COU report on academic staff I described yesterday (mind-blowing because of how much previously unavailable data it provided) and pick up on the other set of issues it raised: namely, the status of part-time and non-tenure track staff (ie. sessionals). The data is not perfect, but it is by several orders of magnitude the best thing ever published on the subject.  So here goes. The report makes a distinction between tenure stream

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January 24, 2018 2 Comments

Mind-blowing Ontario Academic Staffing Data (Part 1)

Buckle up everyone.  COU just did what universities have been telling everyone for years was impossible: publishing actual useful admin data on faculty workloads and sessionals from every university in Ontario bar the University of Toronto (speculate away as to why this is: the footnotes imply it’s because it couldn’t put together the data together properly). It’s all right here.  Read it.  It’s the best data ever put together on Canadian faculty. Oddly enough, COU published this yesterday with no fanfare

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January 23, 2018 5 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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