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Tag: Academic Freedom

Has everybody lost their damn mind?

Some simple Q & As to clear up the present hysteria in Canadian Higher Education follow the sundry events at Wilfrid Laurier. Do Teaching Assistants have Academic Freedom?  No.  Academic Freedom is a protection of faculty rights based (at least in theory) on disciplinary competence.  TAs have rights of free speech of course, but those don’t protect your job if you annoy  your employer.  In this sense, Lindsay Shepherd probably had fewer rights as a TA than she would have

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November 27, 2017 22 Comments

Conservative Leadership Platform Analysis

So, I just read through all the thirteen leadership candidates’ websites, looking for their thoughts on all the stuff this blog cares about: post-secondary education, skills, science, innovation, youth, etc. The things I do for you people. Actually, it was a pretty quick exercise because it turns out almost no one in the Tory leadership race places much importance on post-secondary education, skills, innovation, youth.  They seem to care a lot about taxes, and immigration (and to a lesser extent

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May 9, 2017 No Comments

CEU and Academic Freedom

Let me tell you about this university in Europe. It’s a small, private institution in which specializes in the humanities and social sciences. It’s run on western lines, and is one of the best institutions in the country for research. And now the Government is trying to shut it down, mainly because it finds the institution politically troublesome. Think I’m talking about Central European University (CEU) in Budapest? Well, I’m not. I’m talking about the European University of Saint Petersburg

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April 7, 2017 2 Comments

Carleton’s Loyalty Oath

I am a proud Carleton alumnus.  If you want a master’s degree related to public policy, there are (or were, anyways) few better places in Canada to study.  You get a great mix of students there, many of whom brought perspectives from their work in government or NGOs, and that greatly enriches the learning experience.  I’m always talking up Carleton.  So it’s frankly been a bit dismaying recently to see Carleton’s Board of Governors acting like goons. The kerfuffle has

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August 24, 2016 7 Comments

The Continued Cheapening of the Term “Academic Freedom”

Exhibit One: A Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) briefing note on outsourcing of IT services at universities contains the phrase “Academic staff can challenge access to their professional and personal data by providers of cloud services based on their academic freedom and privacy rights…” Exhibit Two: A CAUT “investigation” shows that at the University of Manitoba, one group of economics profs doesn’t like another group of economics profs, and the majority sometimes uses its democratic rights to make decisions that the minority

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March 24, 2016 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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