For their part, the governments of the poor countries are suspicious of the motives of the rich, remembering their history of colonial exploitation, gunboat diplomacy, and political destabilization. The endless portrayal of rich societies as selfish, godless, amoral, and racist creates a deep alienation. Fear and suspicion prevails on both sides. The scenario planners saw this situation as basically unsustainable, with the distinction between war and crime becoming increasingly blurred, and criminal anarchy emerging as a significant danger to the rich countries.

Not the politics of the nation state, not the politics of the city, not even the grand unifying ideal of democracy itself, have so far managed to halt the growing divide of the rich and the poor. Technology gives every indication of increasing divide. In the global context we know that in India, for example, only 1 per cent of households have internet access while in Singapore internet access is close to 50 per cent. In a country as large as the United States, access is somewhat over 45 per cent and in Britain somewhat less than 30 per cent.

In a historical perspective it has been very difficult to plan, execute and provide transnational educational courses. The League of the Nations started the international textbook revision soon after the First World War. Since then, many efforts have been made to overcome suspicion and mistrust, bias and prejudice in all fields, political and religious in particular, but also social and psychological.

After 1945, Unesco in particular has continued the work initiated in the 1930s. A major achievement of Unesco was the World Conference on Higher Education in 1998. It noted that there is an unprecedented demand for and a great diversification in higher education, as well as an increased awareness of its vital importance for socio cultural and economic development.

The quality of higher education is a multidimensional concept, which should embrace all its functions, and activities: teaching and academic programmers, research and scholarship, staffing, students, buildings, facilities, equipment, services to the community and the academic environment. Internal self-evaluation and external review, conducted openly by independent specialists, if possible with international expertise, are vital for enhancing quality. Independent national bodies should be established and comparative standards of quality, recognized at the international level, should be defined. Due attention should be paid to specific institutional, national and regional contexts in order to take into account diversity and to avoid uniformity. Stakeholders should be an integral part of the institutional evaluation process.

Quality also requires that higher education should be characterized by its international dimension: exchange of knowledge, interactive networking, mobility of teachers and students, and international research projects, while taking into account the national cultural values and circumstances.

Unesco has noted that globalization is consolidated by the extraordinary invasion of higher education by new technologies, specially the internet. The development of communication and information technologies makes it possible for distance teaching institutions to strengthen their position in the educational landscape. They also pave the way for lifelong education for all and at the same time are spreading the traditional universities, more and more of which use distance teaching methods in their activities, thereby making the distinction between the two types of institutions virtually meaningless.

There is an increasing number of university networks of this kind all over the world, and the use of computers in the learning process, access to the internet by students as a vehicle for self-directed learning, educational broadcasting and videoconferencing are all being stepped by.

Higher education cannot, however, be visualized any longer in purely national or regional terms. Future graduates have to be in a position to take up the complex challenges of globalization and rise to the opportunities of the international labor market. The equitable transfer of knowledge and the mobility of students, teachers and researchers, and also the mobility of learning environments using e-Learning applications, are crucial to the future of peace in the world.

We realize that after so much talk of technology and e-Learning we are now talking of peace, cultures and human development. It is not too late to think of the goals of global learning.

All universities have a social responsibility in this matter. The Virtual University project of the government of Pakistanshould have social justice at the very heart of what it seeks to do, and does so, not just for those fortunate enough to be behind the golden barricades, but for those beyond - it is the very stuff of its mission and much reflection is necessary to such a task.

Some may imagine that this task is not for universities but rather that of the government. Yet we have seen globalization demonstrate just how helpless the government can be. It is one of the great ironies of our time that thanks to the spread of democracy, more people than ever before in human history have a chance to influence their governments while at the same time globalization is eroding government's ability to act on their behalf. The reality is that none of us, on our own, can undertake all that is necessary to the task. As Edward Wilson has so cogently reminded us, covenants are necessary to our survival. Corporations - specially those with global reach - governments, international development agencies, institutions such as the United Nations, the fast growing organs of civil society: all these must be involved. Universities must involve themselves in this endeavor or forever abandon any pretense they may have to educating, in the words of the Unesco declaration on higher education "for citizenship and active participation in society, with a worldwide vision, for endogenous capacity building, for the consolidation of human rights, sustainable development, democracy and peace, in a context of justice.

The diversity and change agenda must be driven by an understanding that the world is so complex, so fast-changing, and so full of interdependencies that no one person, no one culture, no one community can hope to understand it. Peter Senge has suggested that organizations have to constitute themselves as what he calls "learning organizations" in order to function in this world. He describes the five key characteristics of learning organizations as having a shared vision, being capable of dialogue or the sharing of mental models, having the capacity for teamwork, developing personal mastery in its members and exercising systemic thinking.

Some people may assume that by its very nature, a university is a learning organization. To think so would miss the point entirely. Indeed to think so would mean that one had fallen into the very trap one would hope to avoid by aspiring to be such an organization. To assume that what one knows is everything - even about any particular discipline - is profoundly dangerous. To assume that one knows everything about what education and what research is appropriate in a world so complex and changeable is even more dangerous. It is particularly dangerous in the world of education where so much of what we do is, whether we like it or not, is value driven.

In a society defined as a knowledge society, "increasingly, academics will accept that they share their territory with other knowledge professionals. The search for formal understanding itself, long central to the academic life, is moving rapidly beyond the borders of disciplines and their locations inside universities. Knowledge is being keenly pursued in the context of its application and in a dialogue of practice with theory through a network of policy-advisors, companies, consultants, think-tanks and brokers as well as academics and indeed the wider society." This has important implications for how a university constitutes itself and how it makes decisions, to say nothing of how it sets its research priorities and decides on teaching and learning agendas. These are all issues of diversity. It means that the institution must conceive of itself in much broader terms, cosmopolitan terms; it means also that it is no longer possible to have all that you need to know within the institution; it means enlarging the number of partners and collaborations and making the borders of the institution as porous as possible; it means embracing diversity in all its shapes and forms. It also means that, as the institution and the world beyond today's boundaries become more permeable, "our own values will be under constant review for that indeed is what we seek to achieve. It is ironical to note that policies in Pakistan are contrary to this as per a recent decision that restrict universities from going out of their own jurisdiction as if being barricaded behind a wall.

Therefore, setting out to become a diverse organization is unlikely to be successful if the present constituents of the university do not have a clear understanding of what we mean by that, what the likely implications are and why it is important. Put in another way we need to have a shared vision of what it is we are setting out to achieve and why. Such a shared vision is only likely to be achieved after a considerable amount of reflection and dialogue. It is too important and requires too great a shift in mental models to be taken for granted that people will accept it as a good thing, or even know how to implement it once they have accepted the concept. Meaningful social change, even in an institution that is relatively small, can only be achieved if the people in the institution can be persuaded that it is in their interests to embrace change and have some idea of what it means to do so.

It should include consideration of the main drivers for change in higher education: the pressure for equity and access, for social inclusion, on the one hand and on the other the forces of globalization which have made lifelong learning an economic necessity and put education on the map as one of the biggest businesses in the world, an intensely competitive arena where only the strong and the focused will survive. The internet alone makes literally thousands of degrees available, some of them with brands that our consumerism culture recognizes and, indeed, to which it responds. Microsoft is a good example. The Open Source ware movement adds impetus to the competitive dimensions, which our institutions have to accommodate. The recent decision of MIT to put all its material on the Web is the first indication of what this might mean.