By Alex Usher. Everyone knows this story, or a variant of it, even if it never hits the papers and no one wants to name names.  It goes like this: Professor X simply won’t retire.  It’s not that he/she (though it’s mostly he) is staying on for themselves, you understand. It’s for the department.  If he/she (mostly he) left, there simply wouldn’t be any guarantee that a new tenure line would go back to the department.  That position might go to another department – or another faculty entirely.  And that would never do – think of the department. More...

By Alex Usher. Now, I’m biased, of course.  I worked at the Foundation.  I met my wife there.  Had Chrietien not risen in the House that day, my daughter literally would not exist and the world would be deprived of its smartest and most beautiful 8 year-old ballet dancer/sumo enthusiast.  But even if none of that were true, I’d still stand by my final comment from five years ago. More...

By Alex Usher. You can tell it’s pre-budget consultation time in Ottawa because university Presidents are writing op-eds about the importance of research and backing the Naylor Report.  But man, are they ever unconvincing. More...

By Alex Usher. I’ve been doing some work on financial data of higher education institutions around the world, and specifically looking at what’s been going on at top research institutions compared to everyone else.  And I thought maybe you all would be interested in what I’ve found for Canada. More...

By Alex Usher. The other day, I questioned a claim made by University of Toronto President Meric Gerlter that we were falling behind countries like “China, Switzerland and Singapore” having made major recent investments in science and higher education.  First of all, I noted, this was an odd trio, with nothing much to suggest it was true other than the rise of a few institutions in such countries as doing reasonably well in various university rankings. More...

By Alex Usher. After World War II, area studies (that is, interdisciplinary studies of various world regions) took off in the United States, essentially because both institutions and governments decided that if the country was going to run the free world, it might help to know something about the various bits of it. 
The CIA had ties to area studies, but so too did the major old-school foundations like Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie. But this was by no means the first time that authorities had tried to use universities’ expertise in the humanities to strategic purposes.  In the early 14^th century, the Catholic church was still reeling from the loss of the Holy Land to the Arabs, and there was a desire to turn things around in part by trying to convert the infidel.  At the Council of Vienne (that’s Vienne, France, just south of Lyon, not Vienna) in 1311, the church decided to set up endowed chairs in Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic both in Rome to serve the papacy directly but also at the Ivy League of the High Middle Ages (Paris, Oxford, Bologna and Salamanca).  Not quite knowledge in the service of the state – but given the link between religious control and territorial control, it’s close enough. More...

By Alex Usher. One big story from out east that didn’t get a lot of play in the rest of the country was the news that the Nova Scotia government had, over the period 2013-2017, quietly bailed out Acadia University to the tune of $24 million.  This is of course the second time a Nova Scotia government has bailed out this decade: the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) received about $10 million. More...

By Alex Usher. I’ve recently been dismissive of the notion that Canada is “falling behind” in higher education since everyone seems to insist on making ludicrous comparisons with places like China, Switzerland and Singapore.  But upon a little bit of further digging, it turns out there is one of our very close competitors which is doing rather well these days, one we probably should be worried about despite the fact that we’ve mostly been ignoring it since the Financial Crisis of ’08. More...

By Alex Usher. One of the holy grails in higher education – if you’re on the government or management side of things, anyway – is to find some means of actually measuring institutional effectiveness.  It’s all very well to note that alumni at Harvard, Oxford, U of T (pick an elite university, any elite university) tend to go on to great things. More...