“Whenever any group of university presidents get together, the discussions always begin with the usual topics: money, students, politics, and for the unfortunate few, intercollegiate athletics. However, after a bit of nudging, it is sometimes possible to push the conversation up to the 100,000 foot level to gain a better perspective of the key challenges and opportunities facing higher education today.

This is where I intend to begin, at the level of issues such as the current budget crunch facing universities both in the U.S. and abroad, the changing educational needs of society, social diversity, technology, and market pressures. But I am going to take the discussion a bit further out, first to the L1 or Lagrange point, one million miles out where Earth appears as “a big blue marble”, and where these issues all converge into three themes of the 21st century: demographic change, globalization, and the knowledge explosion. Finally I will move all the way out to the lunatic fringe, far beyond Pluto to my personal Oort Cloud (from whence I occasionally launch provocative comets inward toward the higher education solar system), and consider several issues that I believe compel us to at least admit into our speculations about the future possibility of the disappearance of the university itself, at least as we understand it today.”