Tag: Western University

The Opposite of Strategy

The London Free Press recently published a summary of Western’s new draft strategic plan (there’s a longer version on Western’s website, but it’s password protected).  I urge you to read it.  It’s not uniquely bad by any means – there are lots of other institutions who have published similar sorts of documents – but it nevertheless represents a kind of quintessence of what’s wrong with university strategic plans.  It is a Stepford Wife of a strategy.  Nothing about it says, “Western”.  You

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The New Western Identity

There was a flurry of excitement last week about the University of Western Ontario’s new visual identity, and deservedly so: it is by some distance the most visually radical re-brand for a Canadian university in many years. Start with the good: getting rid of the tower was welcome and long overdue. The new graphics are a nice mix of old and new, retaining the palette, but significantly modernizing the overall look. They didn’t manage to unify the institutional and athletics

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