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Tag: Faculty

Hiring Decisions

One of the more thoughtful replies I received to my piece on CAUT’s politicization of university accounting pointed out that one of the reasons people didn’t trust university accounting was because they made seemingly incomprehensible decisions with respect to hiring.  How was it, my reader asked, that there was plenty of money to hire sessionals but never money to hire full-time, permanent faculty?  Isn’t that money fungible?  Why spend on one and not the other? I can see why this might

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January 31, 2017 4 Comments

The Politicization of University Accounting

Back in the fall, the Canadian Alliance of University Teachers (CAUT) published an interesting little guidebook called CAUT’s Guide to Analyzing University & College Financial Statements, written by Cameron and Janet Morrill, two profs at the University of Manitoba’s Asper School of Business.  Stripped to its essentials, it purports to be a DIY guide for faculty to help hold their institutions to account over finances. Nothing wrong with that.  Learning how to read financial statements is a good thing.  The

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January 10, 2017 1 Comment

Faculty Salary Data

We haven’t looked at Faculty salary data in awhile.  Time for a gander. Let’s compare data from the years 2009-2010 and 2014-15: a nice round five years.  The data for 2009-2010 is from the old Statistics Canada UCASS survey, discontinued but recently revived; the 2014-14 data is from the National Faculty Data Pool, an organization set up by Canadian Universities to keep the UCASS going after it was defunded.  I have restricted the sample to the 38 institutions which appear

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November 29, 2016 3 Comments

Higher Salaries + Lower Workloads = More Sessionals

On Sunday night, the University of Manitoba and its faculty union hashed out a tentative deal to end a three-week strike.  No details are publicly available yet, but I think the dispute – and the likely strategies used to resolve it – are a useful way of understanding some general concepts around the economics of universities in Canada. Directly or indirectly, institutions get their operating funds from having students sit in classrooms.  Tuition fees are directly related to credit hours

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November 22, 2016 1 Comment

Authentic Academic Eyes

It’s a reasonably common occurrence for academics to diss non-academic professional staff.  “They’re taking over”.  “They’re not like us”.  “They’re ruining the university”.  Book-length whinges (not very good ones, mind) have been written about this. These whinges usually combine two distinct arguments.  The first has to do with the mere existence of some non-academic positions, who often act as the interface between the academic institution and the market (think research services, alumni/advancement, recruitment, marketing and – God forbid – branding). 

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October 4, 2016 3 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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