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This article presents an open letter to Bill Gates. In his letter, the author suggests that Bill Gates should build a brand-new university, a great 21st-century institution of higher learning. This university will be unlike anything the world has ever seen. He asks Bill Gates not to stop helping existing colleges create the higher-education system this nation needs. But he should not wait for them, either. Gates can start that future today. Gates University will be his gift to the world--and the worlds to come.

Built on 1,500 acres of land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea off Incheon, about 35 miles from South Korea's capital, New Songdo City is billed as the largest private real-estate development in history. It is Korea's answer to Shanghai and Dubai. Estimates put the cost of the Songdo project, which is barely five years old, at up to $60-billion. The city's centerpiece is Songdo Global University Campus, a collaborative attempt to blend Korean, American, and European academic strengths. The founders broke ground in May and at least two American partners, North Carolina State University and the State University New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook have each received $1-million in planning money to help develop undergraduate programs. Both colleges view Songdo as a local recruitment hub. SUNY at Stony Brook currently attracts 2,000 students from Asia. The model for the Global University Campus is similar to Qatar's Education City, in which American universities will offer undergraduate programs inside a single campus, while administering them separately. Campus developers predict it will enroll 12,000 students by 2012. SUNY at Stony Brook will initially offer four undergraduate engineering programs, along with a business and a technology-management program. Students will be given an opportunity to study at the U.S. campus as well. Several more partners, including the University of Delaware, the University of Southern California, and George Mason University have signed agreements to start faculty and student exchanges, and, eventually, collaborative research projects. Moscow State University, Glion Institute of Higher Education, in Switzerland; the University of Surrey, in England; and Monash University, in Australia, have also been linked by the Korean media to the project. Songdo's American partners say that despite the potential difficulties, they are in for the long haul.

For government officials in South Korea, it's a vision worth savoring: Within the next decade, South Korea becomes Southeast Asia's top higher-education destination, poaching thousands of Chinese, Indian, and Japanese students from American universities and overtaking rivals Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. The higher-education system's historical insularity fades away. A handful of South Korean universities climb into the premier global academic league. Local students elect to stay at home to attend a branch campus of an American college. Grandiose visions of the future often evaporate in the heat of an economic meltdown, and this one has its share of skeptics. Yet amid the wreckage of Asia's worst slump since World War II, the South Korean government is powering ahead with plans to transform the nation's higher-education system. South Korea has signed pledges of cooperation with American colleges and lured hundreds of foreign professors to what was once considered an educational backwater. The government believes it can propel its best universities into the world's top 50 and stem the flow of students out of the country. These plans, including a state-backed project to build a new "global" university from scratch in partnership with up to half a dozen American institutions, will not be affected by the recession, claim their architects. South Korea has pledged about $600-million over the next five years to its World Class University project, a ministry-of-education-led bid to raise the quality of research at 30 universities. Nine Nobel Prize winners, including the 2006 chemistry laureate Roger D. Kornberg, are among the 81 foreign researchers set to take positions in the country. BrainKorea21, a project aimed at creating "centers of excellence" in information technology, bioengineering, and other "knowledge-based" fields, has been promised $2.3-billion before 2012, in addition to the $1.4-billion invested from 1999-2005. Critics remain unconvinced, however, that these strategies will help South Korea overcome a crippling handicap in original research.

Once named one of the nation's most economically distressed cities, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has since revived its fortunes, repopulating its vacant downtown with offices and restaurants and capitalizing on its strength as a state capital to build a more stable employment base. Now, in the next stage of its economic rebirth, the city wants to reinvent itself as a college town. In 2005, after local community and business leaders pressed for the creation of a local college closely tied to regional work-force needs, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology opened. This spring the private, nonprofit institution, supported largely by city and state grants and local philanthropy, graduated a class of 13, its first with students who started as freshmen. Its advocates believe the university can help stanch an outmigration of college graduates and end an underproduction of science and technology degrees. The university's business backers--who helped draft the curriculum and who teach many of the courses--also hope it can build up the local high-tech labor force. But Harrisburg University also has its skeptics, who question whether an upstart institution is needed when 20 other colleges, including Pennsylvania State University-Harrisburg, in nearby Middletown, sit within easy reach of the city center. Complicating matters is the continuing national economic slump, which has threatened the financial well-being of many established colleges, never mind a fledgling university without a large endowment. Indeed, campus leaders do not expect the university to hit its break-even enrollment of 500 students for another year. Amid challenges, however, the institution has won over some former skeptics. "They're still young," says Don L. Francis, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Pennsylvania, "but I think they've done a good job of developing a niche."

In what university officials say represents a new approach to the internationalization of higher education, Columbia University is building a network of six to eight research institutes in capitals around the world. The Columbia Global Centers, as they are called, are designed for faculty members and students from various disciplines to collaborate on international projects with universities, government agencies, and other organizations abroad. Like a growing number of American universities, Columbia already has a strong international presence, including collaborations with a number of foreign institutions and several regionally focused institutes on its New York campus. But with the centers, which will serve as regional hubs for project-based scholarship, Columbia is headed in a new direction. As the world becomes more interconnected, many of the most pressing issues of the day are best approached not within a bilateral framework, but by groups of scholars and researchers from diverse backgrounds bringing their expertise to bear in novel ways. At the Beijing center, for example, a program on global risk, preparedness, and response to major disasters will involve, among others, experts in geography, engineering, humanitarian relief, and public health from China and the United States. The centers will also offer Columbia students opportunities to study and work abroad outside of traditional semester-length programs. In addition to the major-disaster project, Columbia will also use its Beijing center to expand an environmental and urbanization project called China 2049. Led by Columbia's Earth Institute, together with the Brookings Institution and China's National Development and Reform Commission, the project will forecast what China's economy could look like in 2049 and develop plans for water management and other needs accordingly. The university's architecture school is creating a Beijing design studio as well. Two other of Columbia's global centers will be in Paris and either Mumbai or Delhi, with the goal of having a center on nearly every continent. The other sites have yet to be determined. Although the centers will be hubs for project-based scholarship and are not, at least for now, intended to provide platforms for new degree-granting programs, each one will play host to programs, conferences, seminars, and exhibitions.

Over the past several years, Hong Kong has made a determined effort to raise its profile by positioning its universities to compete globally for students, scholars, and research projects. In the process, it is refashioning its higher-education system from the British three-year model into a four-year system aligned with those of the United States and mainland China; the change becomes effective in 2012. The overhaul includes pumping millions of dollars into research, retooling undergraduate curricula to inspire creative thinking, and hiring more professors: around 1,000 in all. While American computer-science departments were cutting back, Chinese University "had a lot of plans for the future." They are trying to take advantage of the crisis in the U.S. and Europe and bring other people. The global financial crisis has not yet hit Hong Kong as hard as it has the United States, but the territory's reliance on logistics, financial, and other services, which accounted for 92 percent of its gross domestic product in 2007, makes it vulnerable to downturns. Officials see investment in higher education as a way to diversify and move toward a knowledge-based economy. University administrators say they are searching everywhere for talent, but they cite the United States most frequently. Over the past few years, delegations of university officials have traveled to top American institutions to gather both ideas and people. The University of Hong Kong has hired 100 tenure-track professors in the past three years and hopes to hire 100 more. The university is reaching out to both renowned researchers and young talent to help build its reputation, with an emphasis on biomedicine, environmental science, and emerging technologies. Other universities in the territory have less formal plans but are also hiring scores of faculty members. The Chinese University, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University are each adding more than 100 professors, along with dozens of lower-level instructors and administrative staff. Smaller institutions, including Lingnan University, Hong Kong Baptist University, and the Hong Kong Institute of Education, plan to expand as well.

A number of Iraqi-American academics, meeting this month for a conference on how to rebuild Iraq's battered higher-education system, said the Iraqi government's plan to send thousands of students abroad annually would lead to a "brain drain" of a new generation of the nation's top talent. Prime Minister Nuri al-Malaki has proposed spending a portion of Iraq's oil wealth to send 10,000 students abroad to Britain, the United States, and elsewhere each year for the next five years to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees. This article reports on the goal of the Iraqi Academic Conference which was to draw together Iraqi and American academics to discuss ways to improve and support Iraqi higher education and to develop collaborations between universities and faculty members in the two countries. Depleted of resources and isolated during the years of Saddam Hussein's rule, Iraqi higher education came under further siege during 2006 and 2007, years of heavy sectarian violence that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Hundreds of Iraqi professors were killed, and thousands more fled the country. Classes were rarely held. The security situation has since improved, but Iraq needs help to restore its once-flourishing higher-education system. Universities must cope with outmoded laboratories and libraries that are short of needed books and reference materials. Research has languished, and many academics who remained in the country are unfamiliar with the latest pedagogical and technological developments. American academics could form review teams to assess the current state of Iraqi medical schools or other colleges or programs in Iraqi universities. They could make recommendations, provide continuing advice, and even help set up laboratories. The focus could not be solely on building up the capacity of Iraqi faculty members and students. Iraq also needs help restoring its academic resources, like its libraries and museums.

For the past two years, a steady stream of visitors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has made the roughly 7,000-mile trek from Cambridge to Abu Dhabi to help build what aspires to be the first graduate-level research university devoted entirely to fostering renewable, clean, and sustainable sources of energy. Set to open this fall with a few dozen students and faculty members, the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology aims to eventually enroll 800 master's and Ph.D. students. The institute will also anchor a large clean-energy community, known as Masdar City, being built around it. The project is backed by Mubadala, an investment fund controlled by Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and next in line to be president of the United Arab Emirates. The fund says it has set aside $15-billion in seed capital to build the city, including the Masdar Institute. The project is so audacious that some wonder whether it can succeed in today's troubled economic climate. But MIT's work here represents a relatively low-risk investment and offers what may become a more common model for American institutions looking to extend their influence abroad: the behind-the-scenes consultant. For $40-million, MIT agreed to a five-year commitment in which it would help build the Masdar Institute from scratch. MIT administrators and faculty members have been working with local administrators to set up the institute's administrative and governance structure, recruit and train faculty members, and design the course work. MIT has also agreed to help Masdar seek out research contracts with industry and governments. The MIT arrangement will allow it to avoid some of the pitfalls that other American universities have faced when attempting to establish outposts abroad. Many have struggled to transfer the same standards of admissions and instruction and hire the same caliber faculty members that they command at home. At Masdar, MIT's name won't be on any of the buildings. Its professors will not be expected to teach there. And the degrees will be issued by Masdar alone. In fact, MIT must be consulted every time Masdar wants to mention the relationship between the two institutions in its promotional materials. If the Masdar Institute fails, MIT can exit when its contract expires. But if Masdar succeeds, MIT will be forever linked to one of the world's most innovative research institutes, not to mention to the deep pockets of Abu Dhabi's ruling family.

Michael J. O'Connor, the physical-plant director at Appalachian State University, is watching his staff shrink bit by bit. When people leave, he's not rehiring. There is one exception to his staffing plan, however. Despite the economic duress, he is conducting a national search for a sustainability director. The university has ambitious sustainability plans and needs someone to pull its various projects together. The sustainability director is the keystone of any campus sustainability program. Whether or not colleges are creating director positions or replacing people who are leaving might be an indication of how seriously those colleges regard their commitment to sustainability. At Appalachian State, the sustainability director would organize the efforts of various committees and groups on the campus and file reports for sustainability programs that the colleges has signed on to, like the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment. One of the biggest problems of not having a sustainability director is missed opportunities for marketing and communications. Without a sustainability director, there is no coordinated way of getting the million positive things a university has done out in front of the public, in front of the student body, and in front of sister institutions.

Nearly every state is projecting a revenue shortfall for both the current budget year and the next fiscal year, and few public-college officials expect to dodge the budget ax. But some higher-education leaders and state policy makers see the bleak economic outlook as an opportunity to press for broad changes in college policy and operations that have not had much traction under better financial circumstances. Bad budget times are also leading college and government officials to suggest ideas for paring costs that have been too politically unpopular to even put on the table in past years, such as merging institutions, eliminating tenure, and even turning a major public research university into a private one.

Prestigious American universities are franchising their brands in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, building campuses and making it possible for students in those regions to receive an American degree while remaining at home. In doing so, however, they undercut an important component of American education and economy: educating international students in the United States. For undergraduates especially, life at an elite American research university--with its unmatched opportunities to learn both inside and outside classrooms and laboratories--cannot easily be replicated overseas. Students benefit most when they come together, full time, in a setting that offers both intellectual and physical community, a place where core academic values such as intellectual freedom, the unfettered search for truth, collaboration, diversity, gender equality, and even good old-fashioned school spirit are protected and encouraged. In this article, the author discusses how the presence of foreign students on campuses can be beneficial for the American society as a whole. He contends that it is not to the United States' competitive advantage to erect higher visa hurdles around university campuses or to franchise out a diluted version of universities to foreign shores. Rather, Americans should be sure that the best talent can come to the United States, for their own benefit, for the students', and for the ultimate good of the entire world.

Five academics from around the world plan to open a new kind of online university early next year, built upon professor star power and students learning from one another through online social tools. The teachers will be volunteers, the courses will cost next to nothing, and no official credit will be given. The organizers call it P2P University (for peer-to-peer), and they hope to fill what they see as a gap in online-education efforts by traditional colleges, which often focus more on delivering full degree programs online than on one-off courses. The project is running on a shoestring, with the organizers paying the initial Web-hosting fees and volunteering their own time, though they may seek grant support in the future.

As the small states that line the Arabian Peninsula spend billions of petrodollars picking up luxury hotels, satellite television stations, first-class airlines, and high-tech weaponry, three of the emirates (Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar) are engaged in a high-stakes game of one-upmanship involving universities, American universities in particular. The region's traditional centers of education have been eclipsed by war, poverty, and political strife. Recent reports by the United Nations, the World Bank, and others have criticized the educational systems in the gulf as weak and limited in scope, fueling the aggressive push to import high-quality programs. Each country has adopted a different model to woo potential academic suitors. Qatar, less than half the size and with little more than half the population of New Hampshire, has succeeded in part by offering foreign institutions money. The government pays full tuition for all Qatari students, who make up about half of the enrollment. Universities have complete control over their annually submitted budget, while all of their costs, including construction and salaries, are shouldered by the foundation. The multi-university approach has its drawbacks: there is little coordination among the various programs, so that a number of universities offer the same core curriculum, and much-hoped-for synergies between programs have yet to materialize. Dubai's main foreign higher-education is set up as a profit-making enterprise, where buildings are leased to foreign universities. Dubai also has a different target audience: its massive expatriate community, which accounts for 90 percent of the emirate's population. Dubai's Education City enrolls fewer than 1,000 students, in large part because the emirate's goal is to train its own citizens by offering a limited number of higher-education programs. Yet with the planned creation of a second complex, International Academic City, Dubai has also revealed expanded ambitions, and a long-term development plan that will place universities within industrial clusters to form symbiotic relationships. Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates and estimated to be home to 10 percent of the world's oil, worth as much as $3-trillion, is trying a little of everything, building an experimental prototype city that will house, in addition to academic complexes, up to 1,500 technology companies (tax-free and with full foreign ownership.). Some experts are skeptical that opening branches of marquee universities is the best way for these gulf states to improve their education systems, saying that what works in America won't necessarily work in the Middle East, nor necessarily be in students' best interests. The emirates may also be getting more than they bargained for by introducing Western institutions with no indigenous roots, with social repercussions, both positive and negative. Gulf leaders say they are aware of those limitations but don't have the time to build an indigenous system from scratch, that there is an urgent need for quality programs that will produce students right away. Whatever the outcome and approach, concludes the writer, there is no doubt that the gulf states are committed to bringing new life to once-stagnant higher-education systems.

At a recent national conference, colleagues from different academic disciplines but all worked in college or university teaching-improvement programs found that the subject most frequently discussed was how to improve the teaching of "tired" faculty members. Tired faculty members are most often senior professors who have worked at their institutions for many years. They have risen through the ranks to top positions and have earned tenure. Year after year, they teach the same courses, often with the same notes, and are simply not teaching as effectively as they did in the past or could do in the future. Recognizing that no specific strategy is likely to be effective in every case, the writer notes that the most successful institutions do one or more of the following: (1) Provide opportunities for reflection; (2) Teach faculty members new skills; (3) Offer financial support; (4) Establish mentor programs; (5) Combine student ratings with constructive suggestions; (5) Facilitate classroom innovation; (6) Assign short-term, nonteaching projects; (7) Videotape classroom instruction; (8) Help professors give something back; (9) Stimulate interdisciplinary or team teaching; (10) Create individual plans for growth; (11) Encourage legacy teaching portfolios; and (12) Support faculty exchanges. While acknowledging that adopting such steps does not mean that an institution will have no more tired faculty members, the writer advocates that it is probably that at least some will be a bit less fatigued.

This article describes Israel's latest conflict--plummeting government spending and strikes by faculty members and students which are threatening the stability of the country's universities. The founders of the modern state of Israel considered higher education to be so important that they established the country's first two universities long before the country itself came into existence in 1948. Today Israel's higher-education system is in crisis, brought to a standstill twice this year alone by student and faculty strikes over tuition, salaries, and controversial government reform programs. In the past six years, the government has slashed its higher-education budget by 20 percent even as student numbers have soared. Consecutive governments, along with some heavyweight thinkers, have offered conflicting visions of the future: One group imagines an American-style system in which students shoulder a large proportion of their educational expenses, while another argues that the country's vitality rests on its intellectual capital and thus the government should support higher education generously. As the debate rages, many academics here fear that the People of the Book have lost the plot.

Strategic plans migrated to higher education from the corporate world. Although some universities have been drafting them for at least 40 years, their use has exploded over the last decade, particularly in the last two years. Now virtually every institution, from research universities to community colleges, has a plan. Competition for students, globalization, cost crunches, and the accountability push from Washington and state capitals, as well as accrediting bodies, have all fed colleges' need for more-detailed performance indicators and financial modeling. To be useful, the plan must give an honest assessment of where an institution is and where it wants to go, planning experts say. It must also include specific, honest budget numbers. This article lays out the objectives, process, and payoff of strategic planning for university administrators.

Colleges and universities are increasingly spending resources to become more global. For more than 20 years, the author has participated in, or served as a consultant to, the internationalization efforts of a broad range of institutions--research universities, regional state universities, private liberal-arts colleges, and community colleges--and has witnessed a variety of approaches and outcomes. Some institutions experienced significant, transformative change, while others merely developed documents that were forgotten within months of their unveiling. At its best, internationalization is a campuswide undertaking that challenges institutions to view their fundamental missions from a new perspective, to rethink what is learned and how, to redefine their boundaries, and to consciously extend their global reach and impact. To do so, colleges and universities should create a learning environment that systematically gives faculty members and students opportunities to translate knowledge into action in the real world. That requires: (1) articulating a bold vision; (2) investing in the vision; and (3) sustaining the vision. Comprehensive internationalization, when well conceived and well executed, can energize and focus an entire campus toward a common goal, and shape its character and reputation for decades to come.

This paper presents an edited transcript from a round-table discussion in Boston between a group of architects and campus-sustainability directors. They met together with The Chronicle to talk about the issues on climate change, poverty, energy use, environmental health, and the role that colleges, and particularly their facilities offices, can play in dealing with those issues. The meeting was attended by Sarah Hammond Creighton, Tufts University's director of campus sustainability, Thomas Fisher, an architect and dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Tom Kelly, New Hampshire's director of the office of sustainability, and Ellen Watts, a founder and principal at Architerra, a Boston-based architecture firm devoted to sustainability. Scott Carlson of The Chronicles moderated the discussion that started with the definition of "sustainability".

Media coverage of the worldwide outbreak of avian flu and the potential for a pandemic has resulted in anxiety and consternation among members of the US public. The US President George W. Bush has released the federal pandemic-preparedness plan that calls on communities to coordinate plans with local and state health departments and other government agencies, while college administrators, college health services, and academic medical centers are expected to be central to these efforts.

A far-reaching plan to create a European system of higher education, complementing development of a single economic market, is near approval. Eventually, curricula, standards, policies, and financing would converge in member countries. The political mood is currently supportive, and the plan would extend existing successful cooperative arrangements. (MSE)

The new chancellors of the Maine, Massachusetts, and West Virginia state higher education systems use different styles to tackle highly political jobs that frustrated their predecessors. (MSE)

The winners of the 36 1986 gubernatorial elections, their party affiliations, and their views on state issues affecting higher education finance, governance, change, and priorities are summarized. (MSE)