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Tag: Faculty

How Many Faculties is Too Many?

Academic bureaucracy is weird.  Basically, about 150 years ago, it was decided that it was important to have two layers of administration interposed between an individual faculty member and a University President (and later, once the university expanded, a senior team with various Vice-Presidents).  One layer came to be called a “department” and one level came to be called a “faculty”.  These theoretically mapped on to the branches and limbs of the Tree of Knowledge (so to speak).  But they

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October 6, 2020 2 Comments

Coronavirus (14) – The Re-opening Conundrum

Most people want to know how the heck we get out of this mess.  Not dates, necessarily, but the process.  We have to see big declines in the number of new cases before we can start to unwind the physical-distancing measures are now in place.  How few cases do we have to see before the maximum gathering moves from five people (where it currently is in Ontario, YMMV), to ten?  To fifty?  A hundred?  When can we stop having to

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April 13, 2020 5 Comments

A Closer Look at Gender Pay Gaps

Picking up on yesterday’s blog, let’s look more closely at the data on university gender and pay. In particular, we need to look at the underlying factors that cause pay disparities. Years of service is the most obvious single factor affecting average pay. Figure 1 shows the women’s share of the professoriate, by age.  Overall, 41% of the professoriate are women, but it skews much higher among younger (less well-paid) professors and much lower among older (more highly-paid) ones.  Figure 1:

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February 6, 2020 No Comments

More Fun with Faculty Salary Data

Morning all.  Yesterday I promised you more faculty data analysis, and I am going to start by looking at variation in pay by institution.  I’m going to be deliberately provocative by showing people the distribution of salaries at the level where they vary the most: full professorships.  Ready? Figure 1: Average Salaries of Full Professors by Institution (and yes, the X-axis is unreadable, do you know how many institutions there are in this country?), Canada, 2018-19 The point I want to underline

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February 5, 2020 2 Comments

Counter-intuitive Faculty Salary Data

I haven’t taken a good look at faculty salary data in about three years, so it seems about time to catch up on what’s going on out there.  Let’s jump right in. Here’s the big headline: for the first time in about two decades, average faculty salaries are declining in real terms, albeit from quite high levels.  Among full professors and the faculty as a whole, the drop in inflation-adjusted salaries is about 3% since 2014-15; for associates and assistant

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February 4, 2020 2 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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