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Abstract The dominant model of universities, especially in the social sciences, is often based upon academic disciplines, objectivity, and a linear knowledge-transfer model. It facilitates competition between academics, educating students for specific professions from an objective, descriptive, and neutral position. This paper argues that this institutional model of universities is inadequate to contribute effectively to societal transitions towards just and sustainable futures. Taking the Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), the Netherlands, as an example, this paper illustrates the problems with the dominant (twentieth century) model of universities in the social sciences and explores what strategies universities can develop to transform. It introduces the notions of transformative research and transformative education: transdisciplinary, collaborative, and action-oriented academic work that explicitly aims to support societal transitions. It presents the design impact transition (DIT) platform as an 'institutional experiment' at the EUR and a concerted and strategic effort that lays bare current lock-ins of the dominant university model and the kind of institutional work needed to transform universities.

Perhaps the allusions and references contained in the first part of this article might not be readily intelligible to someone whose childhood was not spent listening to stories from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland or to someone not presently involved in the current debates about the finance of United Kingdom universities. Let me therefore offer a few words of explanation.Alice in Wonderland, and its companion Alice Through the Looking Glass, are children's stories which explore the limits of reason in most creative ways. Their author, the Reverend C. L. Dodgson, a nineteenth-century mathematician at Christchurch, Oxford who wrote under the name of Lewis Carroll, used the stories to discuss the nature of limit processes in mathematics, the phenomenon of relative size and aspects of the absurd. In the stories animals speak, playing cards come to life and the heroine, Alice, undergoes many transformations of bodily size. Since I regard the recent research selectivity exercise of the Universities Funding Council (UFC) as beyond the limits of reason, I have drawn upon the Alice stories by way of satire and I have tried to use some typical Carroll literary devices — plays on words, accounts of physical transformations and the like — to emphasize the relevant points.

The financial sustainability of Europe's universities is of crucial importance to the future of the European knowledge-based society and, therefore, to the European University Association. With this project report EUA aims to stimulate the debate with analysis of funding and fi nancing from the institutional perspective. As an independent voice of Europe's universities in Brussels, EUA attaches highest priority to this issue as an essential requirement for Europe's universities to meet the challenge of the "Modernisation Agenda" for universities under discussion with governments at both the national and European level.

Institutions of learning at all levels are challenged by a fast and accelerating pace of change in the development of communications technology. Conferences around the world address the issue. Research journals in a wide range of scholarly fields are placing the challenge of understanding "Education's Digital Future" on their agenda. The World Learning Summit and LINQ Conference 2017 proceedings take this as a point of origin. Noting how the future also has a past: Emergent uses of communications technologies in learning are of course neither new nor unfamiliar. What may be less familiar is the notion of "disruption", found in many of the conferences and journal entries currently.

Is the disruption of education and learning as transformative as in the case of the film industry, the music industry, journalism, and health? If so, clearly the challenge of understanding future learning and education goes to the core of institutions and organizations as much as pedagogy and practice in the classroom.

One approach to the pursuit of a critical debate is the concept of Smart Universities – educational institutions that adopt to the realities of digital online media in an encompassing manner: How can we as smarter universities and societies build sustainable learning eco systems for coming generations, where technologies serve learning and not the other way around? Perhaps that is the key question of our time, reflecting concerns and challenges in a variety of scholarly fields and disciplines? These proceedings present the results from an engaging event that took place from 7th to 9th of June 2017 in Kristiansand, Norway.