Universities accustomed to gripes about classroom and office space had better get ready to deal with complaints over another scarce resource.

Canadian universities are suffering from an ethical failure of nerve.

While navel-gazing is not the unique province of the academy, it does seem to be a core competency. We are aided in this obsession by private think tanks (among others), the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching being one of them.

Anyone who has ever felt anxious about the rapid evolution of the English language over the past two decades or who has ever wondered where our changing language will be in another 10 years will find Mark Abley’s new book therapeutic, sage and enormously informative.

As a first-generation immigrant living in Toronto from the mid-1970s to 2002, I had never heard of Lakehead University. In fact, I first heard of Lakehead University when I applied for the position of director of communications in November 2002.

This spring, The Walrus ran “Failure to Fail,” an article about “The search for the elusive LPFOCU – the Last Person to Flunk Out of a Canadian University. ” Author Jay Teitel gleefully tells of being unable to find a single student who failed out.

I keep my office door largely bare but for a postcard of Canadian artist Joyce Weiland's "Reason over Passion," Trudeau's slogan stitched in bright colours on a quilt. The card is there partly for the amusement of colleagues, who know that my own passion sometimes wins over.