ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the key issues and challenges facing the contemporary university. It includes the issues of access, student mobility, the positional good nature of higher education, new pedagogical innovations, expanding institutional geographies of universities, the rise of new players in the sector including for-profits, and the commercialization of ideas, knowledge and education. The challenge facing many higher education sectors and their academic leaders and managers, to broadly realize a new knowledge-based development model, is driven by three logics 'capitalism's animal spirit' – competition. These logics are changing higher education institutions and changing the nature of strategic planning, away from administering national state mechanisms as a public service and towards competitive and market-based models based on the interests of each institution and its participants. Universities are not only a site of human capital formation but increasingly also a business endeavour best organized using the disciplinary values and principles of competitivism and economic rather than human progress.
