Brenda Gourley argues that the communications revolution offers the chance to share ethics and morals Internationalising a university is a beneficial process to which South African universities instantly relate after so many years of academic boycotts and isolation.
We are, after all, like exiles returning to the world community of scholars and we are only too aware of the deleterious effects of academic exile.
Internationalising our campuses by encouraging students and staff to come from overseas and operating vigorous exchange programmes is not a matter over which there needs to be much deliberation. We have embraced the opportunity with enthusiasm.
But globalisation is another matter and is considerably more complex. It is a phenomenon that completely changes the way it is possible to move money, buy goods and services and distribute information.
Some in the Third World may claim that globalisation is a new form of colonisation and associate all manner of negative attributes to it.
These may be well-considered concerns, but the truth is that railing against globalisation is a bit like railing against the sun coming up in the morning. It is not something that can be wished away.
Academics have to get to grips with what globalisation means for every discipline. It is as much a social and political force as it is an economic one.
Because of its pervasiveness throughout the whole realm of human activity, I liken it in impact to the Aids catastrophe that is sweeping Africa and increasingly other parts of the globe.
It is not possible to have one of the greatest disasters in human history taking place and not expect our students to know anything about it and its economic consequences, its social and cultural consequences, to say nothing of the host of issues that follow in their wake.
In the same way that Aids is not solely a health issue, globalisation is not confined to matters of money or economics. Even though the global economy is not a planetary economy in the sense that it does not - yet - include all territories and people in its workings, it nevertheless does affect, indirectly or directly, the livelihood of humankind.
Anthropologists, archaeologists and others tell us that our different cultures, languages and appearances have come about through the movement of people by migration and transmigration. We have never not been part of the globe.
Yet for centuries people have tried to make sense of their lives by developing cosmologies of containment - whether from nomadic tents or in hamlets, villages, towns, cities and nations.
But technology, from wheels to telescopes, computers and internet, to air and space travel, has gradually insisted on our recognising that our tent is pitched in the universe, and not in our favourite campsite. All cosmologies and religions have within them a recognition of the bigger, the other, the unknown and unknowable.
But our task this day, this decade, this century and certainly the next, demands that we bring what is moral and ethical from our church or hamlet into the compass of the global village.
We are challenged to combine the safety and importance of belief and of linguistic, ethnic or even class identification with the knowledge that technology and science hold up to us.
From the pictures of Earth taken from space to the disease of rivers, forests and people, we must recognise that each hamlet, however remote, will suffer the fate of the whole of the globe. Globalisation is our millennial Zeitgeist.
This sends a strong message for us in the university sector as we try to imagine what constitutes "an educated citizen" and how we are charged with ensuring that our institutions produce such a citizen.
At the University of Natal this challenge has led to us embarking on a thorough reform of the curricula and university structures. We have committed ourselves to replacing departmental fiefdoms with multidisciplinary schools of cognate disciplines, establishing centres of comparative and applied ethics, leadership and enterprise; building core curricula that include not only these concepts but also courses in systems thinking, the meaning of globalisation, the values and concerns of other cultures and races.
We are taking seriously the need for service learning and are fostering an abundance of international links where there are not only exchanges of scholars and students but also joint teaching and research programmes, especially those that address the major problems of our time: poverty, violence, Aids.
The Salzburg seminar recently embarked on the Universities Project, focusing on higher education reform in central and eastern Europe, Russia and the newly independent states. Universities in these regions are redefining their relationships with governments and trying to become more integrated into the global intellectual community.
Its objectives are promoted by inviting senior administrators to take part in conferences and symposia concerning issues of university management, administration, finance and governance.
In 1999, this project has shifted its attention to the increasingly pressing issue of globalisation and its effect on institutions.
How fortunate we are that there are institutions such as the Salzburg seminar that bring us together, regardless of hamlet or affiliation, to ponder this awesome task. There is much more to be done. However, one thing is clear: higher education must adapt or die.
Brenda Gourley is vice-chancellor of the University of Natal, Durban.