This article contributes to the debate on university organisational actorhood by surveying the drivers of university strategic behaviour and choice. Utilising organisational literature and interviews with senior leaders from three Canadian research-intensive universities, the article elucidates the dynamics underlying universities' behaviours…

Most Canadian universities participate in the US-based National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) that measures various aspects of "student engagement." The higher the level of engagement, the greater the probability of positive outcomes and the better the quality of the school. "Maclean's" magazine publishes some of the…

This article examines how a sample of 62 higher education institutions in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom discuss international students in their official institutionalization strategies, focusing on how ideas of race and diversity are addressed. We find that institutional strategies connect international students to an abstract…

As universities face unprecedented pressure to respond to sexual violence, this article critically analyses how they engage with intersectionality in their responses. Based on research in the Canadian province of Ontario, I demonstrate that universities' commitments to intersectionality often fail to translate into practice. This failure results…

This paper describes how a locally developed school ranking system affected student enrolment patterns in British Columbia over time. In developing an annual school "report card" that was published in newspapers and online, the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute created a marketplace for school choice by devising an accountability scheme…

We present a data-based perspective concerning the recent "Maclean's" magazine rankings of Canadian universities, including cluster and other analyses of the 2007 and 2008 data. Canadian universities empirically resemble and relate to each other in a manner different from their formal classification and final rank ordering in the…

In this paper, we examine the factors that influence the reputation or prestige of universities. We first develop a model of university behaviour which indicates how the decisions made by university officials would be chosen in order to maximize their respective reputations. In doing so, we assume that reputation is enhanced by the quality of…