...helping higher education contribute to a livable future

 Papers 

 Our world is not working 

Yet even so, it is terror that has our attention, with war and desperation edging out all other concerns even as our planet may be dying and our very species at risk. What a strange horizon to scan.

If our world is to find its way, what hope there is lies in no small measure with higher education, for it is higher education that determines the values, priorities, and skills of every single profession in the world—of all those who do, on a day-to-day basis, keep our world spinning on its present course. It sets the agenda for lower schools, shaping childhood and the core beliefs of adults. It holds the power to name what knowledge will be recognized and advanced, fragmented or made whole, rewarded or ignored—and to choose who will gain that knowledge. It says what is true, and what is possible, and what is worth talking about—and what is not.

Imagine these vast and subtle powers turned towards the realization of a new democracy, the study of civics giving way to the study of collaboration, and to the hands-on solving of real problems. Imagine PDA’s used in a remote coop to offer timely information on organic farming and micro-credit processes and keep the records required for certification of the crop. Imagine coursework in related disciplines available for some to qualify for a diploma. Imagine people everywhere, already dislocated by the global economy, now gaining its benefits, using the higher learning to reclaim their worlds. Imagine new professions and all professions educated towards the creation of a new prosperity—that to be realized from new research agendas focused on the healing of what has been harmed and the redesign of what no longer works.

Could these things be done? Perhaps. Intractable as higher education seems to be, deep change is nevertheless occurring, not in its flagship institutions, but across the enterprise as a whole, driven by technology and the emerging global knowledge economy. The funding and focus of research are shifting. Collegiality is succumbing to copyright. The independent, if perverse, community of the mind is dissolving into legions of insecure and disenfranchised part-timers. Corporations and software are moving in, alongside colleges and courses, to certify knowledge and order its content—2000+ corporate universities spending twice as much money on corporate training as are spent on higher education, with dozens of technical certificates, sought and recognized internationally, that shape curriculum on campuses both collegiate and corporate.

So the question is not whether a global system of higher education is emerging. It is. But of who will shape that system, and to what ends.

Opportunity without precedent is here, and great danger. Higher education can lose its soul: its integrity, its independent capacity to validate claims and certify competence, its impetus to share knowledge as widely as possible, to seek the truth for its own sake, to challenge and ennoble learners, and to serve contentious democracy—a service all the more needed as a global society struggles to find a global democracy.