This doctoral research examines the challenges, objectives, goals, strategies, and tactics facing leaders, administrators, faculty, students, and other stakeholders with an interest in international higher education. These broad topics necessarily encompass many factors including the market forces of globalization, increasing competition, diminishing budgets, burgeoning demand, transformative technologies, rooted traditions, curriculum renovation, pedagogical innovation, academic freedoms, universal access to learning, evolving governance, faculty reformation, as well as quality protections and overall equity. Rather than treat these factors as distinct and isolable, the text here interweaves them as they interrelate in often overlapping categories of challenges, policy, strategy, tactics, and so on. In this effort, the discourse attempts to construct a spiral rather than a mere repetition of issues, drilling through layers of breadth, depth, and ultimately to application. This may provide a fuller sense of the multidimensional academic frontlines in lieu of a simpler linear and more categorical progression.