ABSTRACT
This chapter describes about the dialogue among civilizations that has blossomed over the last decade, since the end of the Cold War. It begins with a series of challenges presented to the knowledge patterns that had become established in the Western university, and spread around the world over the recent two centuries of its colonial and post-colonial influence. This was followed by several rich expositions of the historical contributions of Eastern civilizations to the knowledge content and institutional patterns of modern higher education. The core values and patterns of the Chinese academy were thus quite distinct from those of the European university. A common curricular structure emerged over subsequent centuries, with faculties of arts, philosophy, medicine, law, and theology. China's traditional curriculum was not characterized by the same degree of hierarchy as has been noted above in the European curriculum, where theology was the reigning science, with responsibility to regulate and integrate all other subjects.
