Abstract:

What Ronald Barnett (2000) referred to as supercomplexity in a knowledge-based society has every appearance of galloping into hyperdrive. While his insightful epistemological analysis of how higher education needs to change to deal with the challenges of this turbulent age was enlightening, he did not go far enough in describing the climactic changes occurring across human civilization today. With the advent of a globalized, interdependent knowledge economy, an international political ecology characterized by chaos and instability with the new alignment of world powers, on-going battles against newly emerging forms of global pandemics, and the conflict spawned thereby, increasingly sophisticated digital media communication and its global synchronicity, and the exponential reframing of our frameworks of knowledge caused by unabated scientific discoveries and new technologies, we have reached the Age of Mega-Complexity in knowing and in being.

As a consequence of our entrance into the Age of Mega-Complexity, university educators, administrators and planners in higher education are compelled to think beyond tertiary education, hence the use of term quartic - pertaining to the fourth degree. In this coming century of transition – just prior to the Age of Spiritual Machines (Kurzweil, 1999), what new roles of intellectual authority and in what new forms of institutional integrity can higher education lead us in taking our societies toward the twenty-second century?

While the treatise merits complete books in response, the presenter makes here a few terse predictions about how higher educational institutions existing now could offer leadership and leverage for navigating this sea of change. Fundamentally, these hinge on re-defining the purposes of higher education, re-configuring its operating plane of institutional existence, and re-conceptualizing the relationship between knowledge production and knowledge acquisition. To allay fears that this paper be too highly theoretical or too academic, concrete and immediately achievable steps for helping higher education not only survive, but also thrive in the new millennium is the core message.

Keywords:

Future of higher education, evolution of higher ed, beyond tertiary education, quartic education, re-conceptualizing higher education.