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Luke insists that he doesn’t need four years at NYU Abu Dhabi—he figures two will be enough. He has heard that the Guggenheim is starting a new museum in Kazakhstan that will focus on Islamic art. An American museum with a Jewish heritage working with the government of a country with a majority Muslim population that was a part of the former Soviet Union to create a Guggenheim Kazakhstan devoted to Islamic art—who would not want to get in on the ground floor of that operation? If Luke discovers that he needs more education, he will take online courses from the company that introduced him to this exciting new world. He continues to watch their course offerings and sees they are expanding and getting better all the time. Luke expects to be taking courses his whole life, and there is no way to know now what he will need to study in the future. Furthermore, he never expects to settle down and live in one place for more than a couple of years and so needs educational opportunities as flexible as he is mobile.

This scenario is not fanciful; indeed, much of it is already available to anyone who is aware of how quickly higher education is going global. And yet most people working in colleges and universities refuse to accept the way the world around them is changing. The few who do realize that schools no longer can operate as they have in the past often become discouraged by the resistance of entrenched interests and declare the situation hopeless. But complacency and hopelessness are luxuries we cannot afford. Though the times undeniably are tough, we have the intellectual, cultural and financial resources to meet the formidable challenges that lie ahead. It is clear what’s wrong with higher education. The only question is whether we have the vision and will to fix it before it is too late.

Acknowledgments

This book has grown out of nearly four decades of teaching, writing, thinking and experimenting. Along the way I have become indebted to many colleagues, students and friends. I would like to offer a special word of thanks to my former faculty, administration and staff colleagues at Williams College and especially the Office for Information Technology, which actively supported all of my ideas no matter how crazy they were. Though many students have helped me over the years, José Márquez and John Kim first introduced me to possibilities I had never imagined. At Columbia University, my colleagues in the Department of Religion and at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life have enthusiastically joined in a sustained effort to introduce institutional and curricular changes we hope will enrich higher education. None of this would be possible without the support of Nicholas Dirks, vice president for arts and sciences, and Henry Pinkham, dean of the graduate school.

John W. Chandler became the president of Williams College the year I arrived as a young assistant professor. Over the years we have become close friends, and I still turn to him for his sage counsel.

My work with Esa Saarinen, who taught philosophy at the University of Helsinki and is currently a professor at Helsinki University of Technology, was formative, and we have sustained our conversation for two decades. In 1998, I cofounded Global Education Network, and many of the ideas developed in this book grew out of that endeavor. I am particularly indebted to my colleagues at GEN, Herbert A. Allen Jr., Herbert A. Allen III, Steven Greenberg, Alexander Parker, Jon Newcomb and Kim Wieland for their interest and support.

As always, the tireless efforts of Margaret Weyers make it possible for me to do all I do.

I am especially privileged to work with Laurence J. Kirschbaum and Meg Thompson, who know their way around the New York literary scene like few others.

If David Shipley had not published my op-ed in The New York Times, this book never would have been written. David was in a class of mine on religion at Williams College many years ago, and I have followed his career with interest.