The still-unfolding economic crisis is bigger, more fundamental, and for good or ill, transformational for all of society. Yet the reaction in higher education has been, for the most part, strikingly timid. The timidity could be especially harmful considering all the challenges colleges already face, including the coming demographic shifts in the traditional-age college population, the mandate to serve military veterans, and the economic imperative to educate a work force to fill as many as 10 million predicted new jobs that will require bachelor's degrees or better by the next decade. A few promising signs of change are already percolating within higher education. The push for three-year bachelor's degrees and a growing openness to the idea that bigger classes are not necessarily pedagogical disasters are two cost-saving trends that may be more revolutionary than they might appear. Yet any successful higher-education czar would say: Go further. That means steps that many colleges have considered but few have yet taken--more outsourcing, more trimming back to focus on specialized areas of true excellence, more mergers. Even those are probably not enough. The author believes that a lack of inventiveness is not the problem. A lack of will may be. Yet even in areas like faculty productivity, new models are emerging. One of them is the free online courses of Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative. The venture, which the university still treats as an experiment, uses artificial intelligence and other sophisticated technologies to improve teaching and learning by creating, for example, virtual labs and more opportunities for meaningful exchanges between professors and students. For now the Open Learning Initiative shows more promise as a new instructional model, not a new business model. Whether Cornell gets it right remains to be seen. But at least it "gets" it. The university's big thinking puts it well ahead of the pack for the transformational times ahead.