In the last half of the previous century, and even more so in the past twenty years of this century, the world seems to have moved into a mode of accelerating change. That change has many drivers, like the growth of the world population, the increasing speed of the development of new technologies, the intensifying global connectivity, the unexpected consequences of collective human consumption and behavior, not to mention the synergies among those drivers. The impact of these changes manifests itself in threats to human societies like climate change, an accumulating soup of microplastics in the ocean, pandemics, resource scarcity and inequality, and an enormous variety of other problems that play out on a local, regional, and global level. Because of the uncertainties generated by the dynamics of these changes, the connection between science, universities and society is losing the stable context within which it evolved for most of the last few hundred years. That context enabled a system of reduced reality to take hold of the western world and, through western domination, to infest a large part of the non-western world with it…
