The crisis literature in higher ed, revisited again and again

By Léo Charbonneau. According to a survey last fall, 89 percent of U.S. adults and 96 percent of senior administrators at colleges and universities said higher education is in crisis, and nearly 4 in 10 in both groups considered the crisis to be “severe.” More fodder for the crisis literature in higher education. In Canada, I’d say there isn’t quite the same sense of foreboding doom, but we do certainly have our own home-grown examples of the crisis literature. This comes to mind because of a stray comment I heard recently from Glen Jones that it has been ever thus. Dr. Jones, professor of higher education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, said one of the first papers he ever had published, nearly a quarter century ago, was an editorial on the crisis literature in Canadian higher education. Read more...