Sustainable Futures for Higher Education : The Making of Knowledge Makers

​This volume addresses the current situation in higher education and what creative action needs to be taken for the future development of the various systems of higher education. Higher education in the 21^st centuries is under immense pressure from various sides. First, there is dramatic limitation of funding from public sources and limited and selective funding support from private sources that is re-constructing the landscape of higher education in most societies around the World. Secondly there is the continuous stream of administrative re-organization efforts of political origins (e.g. "the Bologna process") that guide the advancement of higher education in our present time. Increasing privatization of all forms of higher education--from bachelor to doctoral levels--and its corresponding focus on the advancement of the kind of knowledge that has immediate applicability in various spheres of societies leads to the question- what kind of creativity is expected from the new cohorts of students--future makers of knowledge--once the current social re-organization of higher education systems becomes fully established. To address these questions the international, interdisciplinary cast of authors in this volume provides a multitude of possible scenarios for future development of the systems of higher education.

This book on "Sustainable Futures of Higher Education" captures the current trends and perspectives of the Knowledge Makers from various nations of the world on meeting and greeting the challenges of globalization and the pressures of the knowledge economy. It makes a strong case for universities of tomorrow sustaining their autonomous thinking and yet nurturing an environment of collaborative partnership with society, corporate and industry to fuel innovations in plenty and continuous supply of new science and technologies. Higher Education has been and shall remain a powerful vehicle of national and global transformation. I see a great value of the publication in impacting the minds of the leaders in higher education around the globe for revitalizing the universities.

Professor P. B Sharma, Pr esident of Association of Indian Universities, AIU
How should the higher education system be in the globalization era? In this book Jaan Valsiner and his colleagues analyze, criticize the existing and propose a new higher education system. When we say "higher education", three different layers are supposed to be there-- the lower, the middle and the higher. The latter has the function of production of new knowledges. Without new knowledge, our societies are never improving. Authors warn commercialized systems such as the "Bologna system" overestimate the homogeneity of education. ""Universities without Borders" would guarantee both diversity and innovation in the higher education systems.

Professor Tatsuya Sato, Dean of Research, Ritsumekan University

JAAN VALSINER is a cultural psychologist with a consistently developmental axiomatic base that is brought to analyses of any psychological or social phenomena. He is the founding editor (1995) of the Sage journal, Culture & Psychology. He is currently Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has published and edited around 40 books, the most pertinent of which are The guided mind (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1998), Culture in minds and societies (New Delhi: Sage, 2007), and Invitation to Cultural Psychology (London: Sage, 2014). He has been awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize of 1995 in Germany, and the Hans-Kilian-Preis of 2017, for his interdisciplinary work on human development, and Senior Fulbright Lecturing Award in Brazil 1995-1997. He has been a visiting professor in Brazil, Japan, Australia, Estonia. Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Since 2017 he is a Foreign Member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. E-mail: jvalsiner@gmail.com

ANASTASIIA LUTSENKO is an External Relations Director and a Professor of Management at Monarch Business School Switzerland researching the nexus of entrepreneurial orientation, learning orientation, and human resource management. She holds a Master of Philosophy in Business Research and a Master of Science in Management. She has also been a visiting researcher at York University (Canada). and is presently working on the innovation research project sponsored by the National Academy of Science of Ukraine. Prof. Lutsenko has published in the fields of marketing, HRM, project and innovations management. She is a member of the Academic Council of Monarch Business School and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Monarch Management Review. Academically, shehas won a number of international scholarships and awards including The Marketing Trust Scholarship (UK), MSPME Consortium Scholarship (Erasmus Mundus, EU), the Outstanding Student Leadership Award at Monarch Business School Switzerland where she is presently completing a PhD in International Business and the ASBCP Outstanding Student Leadership Award (USA). Additional experience spans the 7th Framework Program and Horizon2020, UN project UNIDO as well as projects sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, The Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, DAAD, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and GIZ GmbH. She is a member of The Academy of Marketing (UK), The British Academy of Management (UK), and The Continuous Innovations Network (EU)

ALEXANDRA ANTONIOUK is a Deputy Director in Science and Technology Development of Kyiv Academic University, NAS of Ukraine and Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine and is a Deputy Director in Science, Institute of Mathematics of NASU. She holds a Doctor of Science from the Institute of Mathematics of NASU and her research areas include partial differential equations, stochastic analysis and stochastic differential equations on manifolds, asymptotic analysis, infinite dimensional analysis, Gibbs measures. Among her scientific collaborations, the cooperation with the following institutions can be highlighted: the University of Luebeck and University of Potsdam (Germany), University of Poitiers and Bordeaux University (France), University of Oslo (Norway) and University of Vaxio (Sweden). Presently, she is also a Member of Research Council of the Institute of Mathematics NASU, a Member of the Coordination Council of Ukrainian Mathematical Society, a Group Leader in the Horizon-2020 Project AMMODIT (Approximation Methods for Molecular Modelling and Diagnosis Tools) and the President of the Ukrainian Humboldt Club. Dr. Antoniuk was a Humboldt Research Fellow (Bochum, Germany) and received Humboldt Alumni Award.