ANNOTATION for this report: Believing that universities are uniquely positioned to foster a global culture of complexity awareness, the author calls for a reconceptualization of the meaning of "higher education" and presents a strategy for reorganizing the university as a means for creating an educational system that equips students to manage complexity. A measurement tool is introduced which can be used to identify which life situations are fairly ordinary and which are truly complex, with the postulate that the complex situations require a new and different set of skills. Skills for managing complexity are now developed, but have not entered the mainstream of higher education.

An earlier document by Warfield, titled "Interpretation of Problematique for Policy Research,” 13 January 1995" was incorporated (with amendments) into this report. The Problematique was used as example with documentation to support his main thesis in the report. The report "Demands Imposed on Higher Education by Complexity" has the same text as "Chapter 11 Demands of Complexity on Higher Education," in a book manuscript "Complexity and Drummers" that Warfield was beginning to write in 1995. The text of this report can also be found presented as one of Four Case Studies in the student manual prepared for Fourth European School of Systems Sciences, a 1995 summer session program in Hull England, where Warfield was one of the professors. ====================

This report was written by Warfield to interpret the results of an Interactive Management Workshop held in January 1995 for Ph. D. students in Public Policy in which Interpretive Management was used and a Problematique was developed. The January short course (titled Demands Imposed on Research and Writing by Complexity) was taught at The Institute of Public Policy, George Mason University. "The reason that I taught that course in Writing" said John "was because Prof. Kash and some of the other Public Policy professors were complaining that the graduate students didn't know how to write or how to do research, and that there ought to be a course to teach them how to do it." Although Warfield felt that it couldn't possibly be true that the student's didn't know how to write, he agreed to teach the remedial course in January, 1995. What he discovered in the class was what he had suspected, that writing and research skills were not the problem, that the real difficulties were much deeper than that. His work with the students in the class was developed into the report which he wrote almost immediately afterward, and which he presented in his colloquium talk before the TIPP FACULTY in April 1995.

When the material in the report was presented to members of the Faculty at TIPP (The Institute of Public Policy) in a Colloquium talk on 6 April 1995, a set of transparencies was displayed. Both the manuscript for his talk and the transparencies were printed as IASIS reports: 1) "Demands Imposed on Higher Education by Complexity" (the report), and 2) "Demands of Complexity on Higher Education" (the transparencies) Also, copies of both the report and the transparencies were passed out to TIPP faculty, at the time of the April presentation.