By Alex Usher. Whenever you hear somebody complaining about higher education funding in Canada, it’s usually only a matter of time before someone says “why can’t we be more like Scandinavia?”  You know, higher levels of government funding, no tuition, etc., etc.  But today let me tell you a couple of stories that may make you rethink some of your philo-Nordicism. More...

By Alex Usher. I see that Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne recently took offense to the fact that Algonquin College is operating a male-only vocational college in Jazan, Saudi Arabia, calling the arrangement “unacceptable”.
What should we make of this?
First of all, let’s be clear about women and higher education in Saudi Arabia. More...

By Alex Usher. If you follow higher education news from south of the border, one scrap you’ll probably have noticed over the past year or so is the one over tenure in Wisconsin.  Until recently, tenure provisions at the University of Wisconsin were inscribed in state law. More...

By Alex Usher. One of the more difficult problems to unravel in the world of higher education is the fact that universities are responsible both for delivering teaching and judging whether or not a student has learned enough to get a degree.  To most reasonable minds, this is a conflict of interest.  Indeed, this is the conflict that makes universities unreformable: as long as universities have a monopoly on judging their own quality, no one external to the system (students, governments) can make realistic comparisons between institutions, or can push for improvements. More...

By Alex Usher. A few weeks ago, Jamie Brownlee (who I believe is a graduate student at Carleton University) published a piece in Academic Matters (available here) in which he developed a two-part notion.  First, he argued that universities had become “corporatized”, and second, he believes that governments played a big role in this by de-funding universities through austerity. More...

By Alex Usher. The main problem with examining this claim is that the word “corporatization” – much like the term “neoliberal” – can mean pretty much anything one wants it to mean.  I went and checked Brownlee’s PhD thesis for this (available here); in the course of the first few pages, he offers up a number of quite different definitions, without really remarking either on how different they are, or on their implications. More...

By Alex Usher. Yesterday we looked at a few of the hypotheses out there about how IT is destroying jobs (particularly: good jobs).  Today we look at how institutions should react to these changes. More...

By Alex Usher. Back in the 1990s when we were in a recession, Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book called The End of Work, which argued that unemployment would remain high forever because of robots, information technology, yadda yadda, whatever.  Cue the longest peacetime economic expansion of the century. More...

By Alex Usher. You may or may not have noticed a story in the National Post over the weekend relating to a scholar at the University of British Columbia named Lorna June McCue, who has brought a human rights tribunal case against UBC for denying her tenure. More...

By Alex Usher. I had a discussion a few months ago with a government official who was convinced she knew what was wrong with universities.  “They have no discipline,” she said. More...