I have been fortunate to spend much of this past month on various visits to Canada, Finland, Switzerland, and Slovenia, and have come home to the United States more convinced than ever that communication has a real role to play in changing our default assumptions about how the academy works around the globe. Complaints in Europe about the Bologna Agreement - that it isn't working, that it mainstreams excellence and mediocrity, that it overplays professional education over intellectual discovery - parallel concerns in Canada about underfunding for higher education, increases in tuition and a looming shortage of new faculty. The concerns in both regions reflect problems we see in the United States. No wonder, then, that if one feeds "the future of the university" as a search term into Google, nearly 400 million hits surface.

Right now in the United States, the news is filled with images of students protesting major tuition increases in California, and they may yet provide an impetus for core curricular changes in the same way that political protests produced pedagogic and curricular innovation during the 1960s. In today's multiple settings around the globe, the linkage between more vibrant and durable university settings and their economic framework - itself important to innovation, productivity, and economic growth - is undermining the university's sustainability. How can we effect change today in circumstances that seem to be spiraling increasingly out of our control?

It is here that communication has a role to play. I noted in an earlier column that we embody - by definition - many circumstances that other fields of knowledge are only now beginning to embrace - by necessity. Our combination of professional and intellectual concerns anticipates a message now being impressed forcibly upon multiple disciplines: The field of English, for instance, long plagued with declining enrollments and sentiments that students sense irrelevance rather than centrality, reinvented itself over the past decade or so with a gravitation toward cinema studies and the study of popular culture so as to enhance its real-world pertinence. History, seen by too many students as crusty and out of touch with the real world, now labors to reshape itself in ways that drive its practical applications - such as programs in public and oral history or in museum studies. Even engineering, long concerned with the application of mathematical and natural sciences, now tackles a rich multitude of applied arenas, using computer design, technologies affecting privacy, nanotechnology, bioengineering, and other arenas of expert knowledge to engage budding engineers in increasing ways with the public, government, nonprofits, and industry.

In each case, disciplines that were formerly primarily concerned with concepts and theories in the ivory tower now also involve themselves with application and practicality in the real world. Yet this twinning of intellectual and practical pursuits is front and center to communication: The practical arenas of journalism, marketing, advertising, health communication, organizational communication, and public relations are but a few of our subfields that draw explicitly from applied arenas of knowledge. They have been a part of communication for almost as long as communication has occupied its terrain on the disciplinary map.

Similarly, the burgeoning economic malaise in university settings is forcing departments to close and formerly distinct disciplinary identities to merge, producing academic projects that look more like communication than the pristinely isolated academic units of earlier times. Just 3 weeks ago, the trustees at Michigan State University aired recommendations to reshape as many as thirty academic majors, specializations and programs and close two departments "so as to reduce expenses while maintaining quality, efficiency and effectiveness." As newly structured departments have emerged in U.S. universities like the University of Washington, Stanford University, and George Washington University, so too have universities merged in the UK, as seen in the newly conjoined University of Manchester and UMIST or the University of North London and London Guildhall, actions largely taken in response to budget cuts. Arizona State University, cited as recently as 2008 as ahead of the curve in redesigning its structure to offset financial meltdown, now faces major upheaval. One response to these actions is a more forceful recognition of the interdisciplinary education that results from merging formerly distinct intellectual entities.

Here too, communication is ahead of the game. One might argue that internal multiplicity has always been at the heart of the academic endeavor, for the university's unity derives from a healthy recognition of multiple voices. As U.S. historian Alan Brinkley noted recently in Newsweek magazine, "The idea that we must choose between science and humanities is false," because "half a mind is a terrible thing to waste." From our beginnings in communication, however, we have strategically brought together the humanities and social sciences, qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and the interpretive and empirical traditions to form a heterogeneous base for our field of study. We span the university environment, drawing from multiple other fields of study, employing a wide range of methodological tools and embracing numerous epistemological points of view.

This heterogeneity has by necessity increased an awareness among communication scholars that we are part of a larger enterprise than our own research interests, and that the health of the larger shared enterprise depends on everyone listening more attentively to each other. Allowing for an expertise that probes deeply on its own terrain, yet offers enough breadth to recognize the need for exchanges with those possessing different expertise, is critical here, and communication has long projected flexible boundaries that stretch to accommodate emergent problems by bringing different modes of disciplinary expertise into close quarters in various ways.

On both counts, then, we in communication are already situated where the rest of the academy is somewhat tentatively treading. Can we not more effectively share our experience with those now beginning journeys we have long travelled? Two refinements of our collective mindset might facilitate assuming the mantle of that charge.

First, we need to continue developing and sustaining recognition and respect across the internal arenas that constitute our field of study: how can we orient the academy if we don't have awareness about the value of our multiple subfields? There are numerous possible ways of making us more accessible to each other. We could require quantitative and qualitative methodology courses across the board. We could instate a read/write program by which basic literacy skills could be applied across our curriculum; we might learn to write more clearly so that those beyond our own specialized areas of expertise can understand what we have to say while encouraging those who do not read us that there is benefit in doing so. We could foster multiple professional tracks for our students, not just encouraging them to follow in our professorial footsteps.

Steps like these would go a long way toward affirming the necessity of healthy debate and the right to question and challenge givens that appear natural to those beyond our own specific research interests. If we are indeed to remain part of a collective endeavor that can serve as a model for the academy writ large, then we need to develop and assert ways of communicating simultaneously our collectivity, even as it draws from our diversity within.

Second, we need to figure out a different way of sustaining changes if we are to move toward a more central voice in the academy. For instance, despite overwhelming support last year for cross-divisional and cross-interest group conversations, support that was clearly articulated in the survey for Chicago's conference, we received only one submission involving a cross-unit conversation for the 2010 conference. In repeating the cross-unit programming initiative for Singapore, we made clear that each Division and Interest Group would be able to entertain such conversations, as they did last year, without a dent in their panel allotment.

In other words, we saw clear preference for this kind of programming, and created conditions for its continuance, but saw almost no follow-up among Divisions and Interest Groups. If we are interested in clarifying our relevance to each other and those elsewhere in the academy, it seems to me that following through with new initiatives that enable broader recognition of the value of our heterogeneity is instrumental.

Change requires agency, and agency draws not only from making novel connections and forging inspirational moments of transformation but from dogged, sometimes tedious activities behind the scenes that keep those new linkages and inspirational moments on track. The U.S. musicologist Don Michael Randel - also a former president of the University of Chicago and head of the Mellon Foundation - noted almost 10 years ago that the chief threat to the idea of the university "comes not from without but from within." So too with communication and ICA as its premier academic organization. Communication is poised for its next moment of leadership, but we need to keep our eye on the prize if we are to get there.