As Editor and founder of the Journal of Excellence in Higher Education, I would like to welcome you to our Fall 2000 issue. We hope you enjoy the article and book review we’ve collected for you.

Today nearly 50% of college students are over the age of 25, and being a student is not their full-time job. They are pursuing careers, raising children and providing extraordinary service as volunteers in their communities while going to school. Often this population goes unrecognized and underserved by educational institutions.

Sandmann in Adult Learning (1998) writes that the strength of adult learning rests, in part, on the richness and depth present in the multifaceted lives of adults. As championed by Paulo Freire and others, we know there must be shared power in learning, a shared covenant between learners and educators. However, the expert model is slow to die! As educators, we cannot “instruct” passive learners to become independent thinkers. We can only create and support the conditions necessary for the emergence of a mutual learning process. Recognition of the knowledge and wisdom that adult learners bring to the classroom can empower both educator and student to go beyond traditional roles and enrich the scholarship of instruction. A co-learning model, rather than an expert model, seems appropriate in the post-heroic era and fully acknowledges the life contributions of adult learners. Higher education is in a time of great transition. The traditional delivery systems are running headlong into cyberspace. The traditional organizational structures are continually being called into question and the many forces affecting higher education require unprecedented levels of organizational flexibility, adaptability and change leading to new forms.

Although Adult Educators know how to help adults achieve a college education, many policies and practices in higher education are holdovers from the time when traditional students predominated on campus. The critical need to rethink practices in higher education is succinctly stated in many current research

The featured article in this issue concerns knowledge transfer, commonly referred to as technology transfer. It is a contentious issue in Canadian universities and in Canadian public policy. The recent report (May 1999) of the Prime Minister’s Advisory Council on Science and Technology (ACST) recommended processes by which intellectual property developed by university faculty should be protected and commercialized. University research and technology transfer administrators and faculty, as well as national academic and faculty union organizations, cautioned the government against imposing unilaterally a knowledge transfer and commercialization regime. While the ACST recognized the importance of enhancing the knowledge transfer role of the university for the intellectual, social, cultural and economic benefit to Canadians, universities argued that they already had effective vehicles for knowledge transfer e.g., technology transfer offices, policies that reflect institutional culture and philosophy. In this paper, we analyze some of the issues related to the knowledge/technology transfer processes in Canadian universities, describe two examples of knowledge transfer (spin-off companies and National Centers of Excellence), and consider policy issues with which Canadian scholars and administrators are confronted as they address the various demands on theirs and the universities’ resources.