Jessica Riddell is an award-winning teacher at Bishop's University, Executive Director of the Maple League of Universities and project leader for their WINCan partnership. In this edition of her University Affairs column, Jessica explores how collaboration across institutions and sectors is bound to be disruptive for academic partners:
The real disruption is not in the tools (tools change and we often adapt without changing deep structures) but rather in changing the rules...We change the rules of the game when we ask universities to collaborate when they’ve been hardwired to compete. This is no easy ask: universities compete when they recruit prospective students, in external funding, amongst one another in athletics, and in capital campaigns and annual funds...How do we rewire our mindsets in order to think carefully and critically about how collaboration makes us all better than the sum of our individual parts?
To read the full text of Jessica Riddels’s University Affairs column, click here.