Creso Sá

On June 2nd Creso gave a talk to Chinese university leaders attending the University Leadership Program at the University of Toronto. The talk entitled “Building Research Excellence” was part of the two day program organized by OISE’s Continuing and Professional Learning unit.

Research team member Darren Deering presented two papers at the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education Conference that took place May 25-27 at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. He presented a sole authored paper entitled Responsibility Centre Budgeting and Management: Hastening the demise of collegial governance?, and a paper written in collaboration with Cynthia Field, a former team member, entitled An Alternative Explanation for Isomorphism: A resource dependence approach to academic drift.

The Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education Conference takes place annually and this year’s theme was “Borders without Boundaries.”

In March, five of our team members presented at the 58th annual Comparative and International Education Society Conference that took place in Toronto. Andrew Kretz, Kristjan Sigurdson and Creso Sá presented findings on a study that explores how technology transfer indicators have informed science policy-making in Canada and the European Union. In another session, Darren Deering and Cynthia Field presented a paper entitled University Rankings: Encouraging Academic Drift through Isomorphic Processes, which discusses the impact of the pressures of rankings and the quest for prestige on higher education institutions.

The annual CIES conference is organized by the Comparative and International Education Society in order to promote scholarly research and academic discussions to explore issues in education in a comparative perspective.

Creso’s recent writing includes a number of papers on the link between higher education and innovation in the BRICS. This includes two invited chapters in an edited volume, Higher Education in the BRICS countries: Investigating the pact between higher education and society, edited by Simon Schwartzman and colleagues, to be published by Springer.

A review essay on a recent book on the topic, University Expansion in a Changing Global Economy: Triumph of the BRICs?, is due to appear in the February issue of Comparative Education Review.

Finally, an invited paper is currently being written on the Brazilian policies to induce international collaboration in higher education, for a special issue on the BRICS in Frontiers of Education in China.

Last week, Merli successfully defended her doctoral dissertation entitled: Expertise and Policy Learning – The Case of EU’s Research Policy, supervised by Creso Sá. The group wishes her the best of luck in the coming year and looks forward to continuing to collaborate with Merli on innovative research projects in the future as she moves on from her time at OISE. (From left to right in the photo: Glen Jones, Ruth Hayhoe, Merli Tamtik, and Creso)