Introduction

The authors organized a conference, “Global Higher Education in 2050: Imagining Universities for Sustainable Societies,” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, March 4–6, 2020, right before the campus was closed for eighteen months in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The event's premise was that the futures of higher education will be plural, must be responsive to large international divergences, and must be actively created by global majorities rather than policy elites. This introduction describes the papers' common project of identifying the key elements in the higher education status quo and features that might lead toward unexpected futures. We summarize the three horizons methodology that guided some of the work. We also outline the activities of the third day, the workshop that sought a means of linking the present to the future. This work continues beyond the horizons of the papers published here.