By Alex Usher. So, earlier this month, federal Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains wrote an op-ed in the Toronto Star which lays out, as clearly as possible, where the current government’s thinking is with respect to Innovation policy.  Some of it is good, but some of it is dreck. More...

By Alex Usher. A few weeks ago, the Times Higher Education published a ranking of “top attractors of industry funds”.  It’s actually just a re-packaging of data from its major fall rankings exercise: “industry dollars per professors” is one of its thirteen indicators and this is just that indicator published as a standalone ranking.  What’s fascinating is how at odds the results are with published data available from institutions themselves. More...

By Alex Usher. If there is one thing university Presidents desire, it is to be useful to society – and preferably to the government of the day, too.  After all, post-Humboldt, universities exist to strengthen the state.  The better a university does that, the more it will be appreciated and, hopefully, the better funded it will be.  So it has always struck me as a bit odd how little universities (an business schools in particular) have really done in order to help work on the causes of Canada’s perennially sluggish economy. More...

By Alex Usher. Last week, Mike Gow at the Daxue blog linked to some interesting data recently published by the Chinese government with respect to the budgets of the country’s top universities.  It only covers those institutions which report to the Ministry of Education (and therefore misses some important institutions like the University of Science and Technology of China (which reports to the Chinese Academy of Sciences) and the Harbin Institute of Technology (which reports to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology).  It suggests that, at the very top of the Chinese system, there are some jaw-dropping amounts of money being spent. More...

By Alex Usher. So there’s a kerfuffle going on in New Brunswick about the government’s new “tuition-free” policy for students from families with under $60K in income which I mentioned in passing a couple of weeks ago.  Basically, the problem is that the government drew up the program hurriedly, on the back of an envelope, and didn’t think through the consequences. More...