By . 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 . 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 14th 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 . 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 . 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 . 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...
By . I recently read the book A Perfect Mess: the Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education by David Larabee. It’s very good – in fact, the first two chapters are for my money the best short history of pre-1900 American higher education ever written. I’m going to refer to this book a few times over the next couple of weeks. But today, I want to talk about an engaging little passage he penned about how business came to view college (that is, American “college”, our universities) as an indispensable pre-requisite to white collar jobs. More...
By . Earlier this year, I raged a bit at a project that the Ontario government had launched: namely, an attempt to survey every single student in Ontario about sexual assault in a way that – it seemed to me – likely to be (mis)used for constructing a league table on which institutions had the highest rates of sexual assault. More...
By . I made a little remark last week to the effect that on present trends, student fees would pass provincial funding as a source of revenue for universities by 2020-2021 and combined fed-prov government funding by 2025. Based on my twitter feed, that seems to have got people quite excited. But I should have been a little clearer about what I was saying. More...
By . The OECD put out its annual Education at a Glance publication yesterday. No huge surprises except for the fact that they appear to have killed one of the most-used tables in the whole book (A.1.2, which compared tertiary attainment rates for 25-34 year olds by type of tertiary program – i.e. college v. university) which is an enormous bummer. The finance data says what it pretty much always says: Canada is the #2 spender overall on higher education at 2.6% of GDP (just behind the US at 2.7%). More...
By . One of my distractions over the past summer has been to learn more about Chinese universities. And, fortunately, this is becoming a lot easier as Chinese universities are starting to put more of their data online. Today, I just want to take you through a bit of a tour of China’s top universities (roughly the equivalent of the US Ivy League), which are known as the “C9”, most of which now put their financial data online. More...
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