Higher Education in Southeast Asia and Beyond #Issue 06

DISRUPTIONS AND HIGHER EDUCATION: THE COMING CRUNCH
Disruptions and Higher
Education: The Coming Crunch
Gerard A. Postiglione
It has become important to consider the
long-term impact and disruption that
accelerated technological change and
intensified economic globalisation will have
on universities, as well as on social and
economic life. As the world becomes more
interconnected and interdependent than
ever imagined, it has generated enormous
amounts of wealth, higher incomes, rapid
urbanisation, and reduced poverty. But it
has also sharpened and intensified social
inequalities and created political disruptions
that threaten to tear societies apart.
Technological acceleration and economic
globalisation have yet to significantly
address global issues such as climate change
and the larger common good as represented
by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Populist movements in several Western
societies around the globe continue to
divide societies with a fear of the “other”
and a denial of selected scientific truths.
Universities push back by doing what they do
best — building trust through free enquiry,
ensuring that impersonal criteria are used to
establish scientific facts, promoting the open
communication of ideas, supporting the next
generation of critical thinkers, placing value
on a diversity of types of intelligences, and
working for the common good and growth of
an enlightened public.
Universities are facing the challenge of how
to realign their core missions with the rapid
emergence of technological innovations such
as artificial intelligence (AI), big data and
algorithms, facial recognition, biosensors,
augmented reality, gamification, blockchain,
cloud computing, and other yet-to-be-created
technological innovations. These are disruptive
innovations, but they can also be tapped for
their potential to improve how students are
selected, how courses are offered, how student
learning is programmed and evaluated, how
higher finance is managed, how knowledge
networks are organised, accessed, and
expanded, and how more graduates can be
prepared for entrepreneurial jobs, smart cities,
and sustainable development.
HESB | SEPTEMBER 2019 | ISSUE #06 | PAGE 11