From Peter Senge's The Necessary Revolution: "Occasionally something different happens, a collective awakening to new possibilities that changes everything over time -- how people see the world, what they value, how society defines progress and organizes itself, and how institutions operate."  In Boldly Sustainable: Hope and Opportunity for Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change, released last month, Andrea Putman and I explore the potential of the sustainability revolution to transform higher education.

I think a lot of us are ready for big changes in higher ed.  See Mark Taylor's recent op-ed in the New York Times, "End the University as We Know It."  Despite these calls for change, of course, there is always the chance that higher ed will end up becoming what Putman and I call "the intellectual equivalent of Easter Island": a place we pay a lot of money to visit and then leave -- in the end, the encounter doesn't have much impact except to remind us how isolated the place is from the rest of the world. The university either becomes the engine driving us into a sustainable future or it becomes a curiosity/exotic luxury. Nothing in between. The rest of us will move to the Web or create new learning communities. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive options; indeed, for some people, they are one and the same.