Will higher education leaders have to turn their backs on general education and its tenure-protected goals of critical thinking, open discourse, reasoned debate, and learning to learn?  No; the technology-enabled common course redesign strategy described in the next section is a proven strategy for using technology to improve and account for student learning outcomes while simultaneously reducing the direct costs of instruction in high-enrollment general education courses.

Will higher education leaders have to become relentless cost cutters in response to unrelenting pressure on traditional public and private sources of revenue?  No, but they will have to differentiate key unit costs—such as costs per credit, costs per graduate, and so on—from aggregate revenues and learn to use technology to redesign services to improve their quality, capacity, and flexibility while simultaneously driving down their unit costs. 

In its use of technology, higher education has creatively moved from supporting random acts of progress (serendipitous grass-roots successes) to supporting pockets of progress, such as the examples cited above and the increasing attempts to implement portal technology to integrate customizable self-service around a number of academic and administrative service functions.  The time is right to align executive and academic creativity to move toward systemic progress on improving institutional performance in the public interest.  Higher education boards, executives, and faculties must learn to work together to create differentiated academic management and governance models selectively designed to fit each of the diverse mission planks and public-interest obligations of their institutions.  Only then will the coupling of academic creativity and freedom at the heart of academic culture not become its own worst enemy, but instead serve the public interest it was designed to serve—in an accountability-based social compact of mutual trust and support.