Introduction

This book is an attempt to describe how higher education will be reformed, or reformed, in the new millennium-literally formed again not simply developed, adapted or improved. The starting point, therefore, is that higher education faces radical, even disruptive, change. The university of tomorrow will not simply be an extension of the university of today, still recognizable as the institution forged in the successful scientific, industrial and democratic revolutions of the past two centuries. Instead the university will be a transgressive institution penetrating, and penetrated by, other knowledge organizations in a new kind of society. Nor will higher education in the twenty-first century be the culmination of the systembuilding, state-spon-sored, public-education projects of the recent past-sadly perhaps. Systems as they exist today are likely to be progressively eroded by new patterns of management, novel approaches to policy-making and the impact of new technologies. The future will be a foreign country.