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Tag: United States

Same But Different (Part 2)

Yesterday, I outlined the key similarities between the US and Canadian higher education systems.  Today, let’s talk differences.  The most obvious dissimilarity is some of the institutional forms. Religious colleges are much thicker in the ground in the US, as are liberal arts colleges (neither is unknown in Canada, but they take up a lot less space).  Community colleges look vastly different: in Canada they are their own sector, with most programs leading to stand-alone vocational credentials, though “vocational” is

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November 3, 2021 1 Comment

Same But Different (Part 1)

One of the challenges I find in doing comparative higher education work is that because everyone in the field went to university, they think they know what a university is.  But the fact is universities around the world are different: they are run on different logics; they aspire to do different things and hence can have differing operational processes.  Making useful comparisons, or trying to infer motives for institutional actions in other countries, can be very difficult. One of the

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November 2, 2021 1 Comment

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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May 27, 2021 1 Comment

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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May 19, 2021 No Comments

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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February 11, 2021 No Comments
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