The Future of the University: A Perspective from the Oort Cloud

The need for higher education will be of increasing importance in our knowledge-driven future. It has become increasingly clear that our current paradigms for the university, its teaching and research, service to society, and financing, all must change rapidly and perhaps radically. Hence, the real question is not whether higher education will be transformed but rather how and by whom. If the university is capable of transforming itself to respond to the needs of a global culture of learning, then what is currently perceived as the challenge of change may, in fact, become the opportunity for a renaissance, an age of enlightenment, in higher education in the years ahead.