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Tag: Books

Asleep at the Switch…

… is the name of a new(ish) book by Bruce Smardon of York University, which looks at the history of federal research & development policies over the last half-century.  It is a book in equal measures fascinating and infuriating, but given that our recent change of government seems to be a time for re-thinking innovation policies, it’s a timely read if nothing else. Let’s start with the irritating.  It’s fairly clear that Smardon is an unreconstructed Marxist (I suppose structuralist is

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January 29, 2016 No Comments

The Future of Work (and What it Means for Higher Education), Part 1

Back in the 1990s when we were in a recession, Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book called The End of Work, which argued that unemployment would remain high forever because of robots, information technology, yadda yadda, whatever.  Cue the longest peacetime economic expansion of the century. Now, we have a seemingly endless parade of books prattling on about how work is going to disappear: Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s The Second Machine Age, Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots, Jerry Kaplan’s Humans Need not Apply, Susskind and Susskind’s The Future of the Professions: How Technology will Transform

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January 27, 2016 2 Comments

One In, One Out

I had a discussion a few months ago with a government official who was convinced she knew what was wrong with universities.  “They have no discipline,” she said.  “They just go out and create new programs all the time with no thought as to what the cost implications are or what the labour market implications are, and so costs just keep going up and up.” I told her she was only half right.  It’s absolutely true that universities have no discipline when it

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January 25, 2016 6 Comments

A Ministry of Talent

My friend and colleague, Jamie Merisotis of the Lumina Foundation in the United States, recently wrote a book called America Needs Talent.  It’s a short, popularly-oriented account of how human capital drives the economy, and what countries and cities can do to acquire it.  One of the suggestions he makes is for a federal “Department of Talent”, which is intriguing as a thought experiment, if nothing else.  So let’s explore that idea for a moment. To begin, let’s be clear

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November 13, 2015 1 Comment

Amusing Footnotes on Global Academic Pay

A few months back, I finished reading The Global Future of Higher Education and the Academic Profession: The BRICs and the United States (edited by – among others – Phil Altbach and Liz Reisberg). It’s a good book for two reasons: first, it contains pretty good thumbnail sketches of the four BRIC countries’ higher ed systems, and second, it shows how crazy and fragile academics lives are in most of the world. (An aside here: one thing I really like about this book is

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October 22, 2015 No Comments

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