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On the brink

This book is not about the demise of universities, claim the. editors in the opening summary. Far from it. This book presents a collection of intriguing and informative discourses on the timely and frequently timeless issues facing higher education and society. We rarely pause to consider the relatively short history of the modern university, nor the implications of education's substantial evolution over the past 50 years, in kind as well as in size. The University of Victoria in Canada did so on the occasion of its twenty-first anniversary as a degree-granting institution. This book was prompted by wide interest in the issues raised and contains selected papers from the conference. A hundred years ago, only 6 per cent of the fourteen-to-seventeen year olds in the USA attended high school and only 3 per cent graduated. Even as recently as 40 years ago only about 40 per cent obtained high school diplomas. Today, this fraction has doubled and about 60 per cent of the graduates go on to college. An enormous growth in higher education, both in terms of absolute enrolment and the participation rate, has occurred in the USA since World War II. In other countries, analogous growth is even more recent. Everywhere, fundamental changes in the university system are taking place in decades rather than centuries. More than ever before, as the microelectronic revolution pervades society, knowledge is becoming an article of commerce. Two questions dominate our analysis of universities and society as we near the twenty-first century. First, in their efforts to stay near the customer are universities in danger of losing their independence from government and business? Second, can universities adjust and thrive in the information age or, perhaps more succinctly, what will be the effect of technological development on intellectual inquiry?