Tag: United States

Campuses and Univer-Cities

For the last couple of weeks, I have been plowing through three books on universities and their built environments: Paul Venable Turner’s classic tome Campus: An American Planning Tradition, two recent works on universities and cities: Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century by LaDale C. Winling, and In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities by Davarian L. Baldwin, both dealing primarily with urban universities in the United States (though the latter has some

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The Biden Re-Set

One of the most amazing things about Joe Biden’s presidency is that we don’t have to hear about it all the time.  For days – nay, weeks – on end, we can go about our business without thinking about what the US Head of State is doing or saying.  It’s brilliant.  But while the vacation is nice, it’s time to start paying attention again because very big things are afoot in DC with respect to higher education. It’s worth surveying

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Amateur Hour

This week, in between negotiating computer crashes, dealing with angry university finance people and the usual grind, I managed to read a new book on the history of university teaching in the United States called The Amateur Hour by Jonathan Zimmerman.  It is pretty innovative in its way: there are histories of higher education in abundance, but most of them end up being histories of institutions (or institutional types), or sociological histories of the student body, or whatever: focussing on what was

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46

At noon eastern today, Joe Biden will take the Oath of Office and become the 46th President of the United States.  The Pumpkin Fascist may be out of our hair, at least for awhile, what with the pending bankruptcy, sexual assault charges, tax, bank and real estate fraud charges, the emoluments case, plus whatever charges he will face for his role in the Cosplay March on Rome earlier this month.  But the country still faces the task of getting out of

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What People Are Complaining About When They Complain About Performance-Based Funding

If you are a faithful reader of this blog, you’ll know I am not a big fan of the Performance-Based Funding (PBF) systems being developed by the governments of Alberta and Ontario (though the latter is a bit less hopeless than the former).  But unlike many who oppose these initiatives, I don’t think PBF is a bad idea in principle: I’ve written quite extensively about why they’re a good idea, at least when designed correctly.  Today I want to talk about

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