The Universities Of Canada

Nothing Less than Great addresses the current challenges faced by Canada's university system and offers solutions to help improve the academic experience of students.

In communications, health care, and economics, events, discoveries, and decisions that originate beyond national borders today routinely influence national policies and practices. But how are our system of education, and particularly our universities, affected by globalization? A New World of Knowledge examines how globalization has obliged universities in Canada to reassess and rethink the international dimension of their mission and practice. All now include an international dimension in their mission statement. Is this a true statement of educational principles? Or is it simply a marketing message intended to position the university to cope with budget reductions through the sale of educational services? A New World of Knowledge looks at the important role that Canadian universities have played in shaping Canada's response to the problems of international development. It provides the historical backdrop and level of analysis needed to properly inform choices for the future of higher education in Canada and abroad. The book will interest teachers and administrators in institutions of higher education, especially in international affairs and educational studies; practitioners in organizations that depend on university linkages (such as in NGOs and research-granting organizations); government officials in the education sector; and students looking for an international education.

Canada was one of the first Western countries to sign an agreement to provide development aid to China in 1983, and the Canadian International Development Agency invited universities to cooperate in ways that would facilitate "the multiplication of contacts at the thinking level." In Canadian Universities in China’s Transformation, leading scholars from Canadian and Chinese universities elaborate on the historical experience of collaboration in areas as different as environmental science, marine science, engineering, management, law, agriculture, medicine, education, minority cultures, and women’s studies. Contributors use theoretical frames such as dependency theory, human capital, the knowledge economy, and Habermas’s theory of communicative action, to facilitate a striking dialogue between Canadian and Chinese perspectives on common questions. They provide insights into factors that ensured the long-term success of some partnerships, as well as barriers that hindered others, and vivid lessons for current collaboration. Case studies include a project that began with the training of Chinese judges developing into reciprocal programs in legal education in China, Canada, and Latin America, and an examination of how joint environmental research has had policy impacts at national and international levels. Presenting the story of universities working together in the era after the Cultural Revolution, Canadian Universities in China’s Transformation is a unique account of partnerships in knowledge production and application and their resulting impacts.

Canadian universities are being slowly but inexorably corporatized. Casualizing academic labour, remaking students into consumers of education, implementing corporate management models and commercializing academic research all point to the ascendance of business interests and values in Canada’s higher education system. Academia, Inc. examines the tensions that result from the merging of two fundamentally incompatible institutions — the university and the corporation. Brownlee argues that moving from liberal education to corporate job training, public service to profit-making and critical research to commercial invention radically undermines the goals of higher education. Investigating the history, causes and impacts of corporatization, this book explores how this transformation has taken shape and its ramifications for both universities and society as a whole. Brownlee suggests several strategies for resisting this process.

In 2011, the first edition of Campus Confidential sparked a lively debate about what is really going on inside our colleges and universities. The media and readers alike welcomed this readable, honest book. University authorities didn't. They took the authors to task for spilling the beans. In this second edition, Ken S. Coates and Bill Morrison pick up where they left off, adding new and up-to-date information for students and their parents to consider. Among the questions they address: Why more students should consider the skilled trades Whether a BA is ever worth the paper it's printed on How roving administrators are undermining universities Why we over-produce graduate students What's right (and wrong) with what's happening on campuses in Quebec Now that nearly everyone goes to college or university but only a small percentage of graduates actually find employment in their chosen field, understanding what's really going on in Canadian postsecondary institutions is more important than ever. Readers can count on Ken S. Coates and Bill Morrison for unexpected insights and lots of fresh new ideas and information.

Published in 1997. People wishing to learn the major phases in the development of Canada's twelve postsecondary higher education systems over the 1945-95 period will find this an essential starting point.

In the 1990s Canadian universities experienced an aggressive campaign of corporatization. Universities for Sale offers suggestions on how to resist corporatization. Neil Tudiver shows how scholarly independence has, in recent years, been eroded to a point of crisis. Left unchecked, corporations play a larger and larger role in deciding which fields of study survive and which will disappear. He looks at how professors defend free inquiry against the pressures of economic expediency. Universities for Sale is a penetrating analysis of the ongoing issue of corporate influence on Canada's universities.