use, and social unrest exceeds the cost of public sector employment generation programs, such as demonstrated by India’s Rural Employment Programs. Global Higher Education--World University Consortium The founders of WAAS were committed to the idea of establishing a World University under the auspices of the Academy, with the aim of fostering the growth of knowledge and cultivating enlightened judgment around the needs and aspirations of people. The idea was to identify and serve the common interest of humankind by offering inquiring minds a way to relate their intellectual specialties to the idea of human dignity — a process that would be open to continual clarification in a changing social environment. The original Declaration of the World University in 1960 stated that “the timeliness of the idea of a world university is beyond reasonable reservation. The expansion of science and technology has put at our disposal an unparalleled instrument of fulfillment or destruction; if man is to take the future evolution of body, mind and civilization in his own hands it is imperative to find more effective ways of integrating what he knows with what he does.” The founders developed a management structure and executive committee, and established a set of operational centers in leading educational and research institutes in several countries. Inspired by the original vision of the Academy’s founders and reshaped by the global challenges and emerging opportunities at the time, the Academy established the World University Consortium (WUC) in 2013 in association with eminent international institutions. The organizations mission was to evolve and promote the development of accessible, affordable, quality higher education worldwide based on a human-centered approach. Their approach was to shift from specialized expertise to contextualized knowledge within a trans-disciplinary conceptual framework — that better reflected the complexity and integration of the real world. At the UNOG-WAAS conference at Geneva in 2013, WAAS President Garry Jacobs posed the question: "If you were trying to create a global system of world-class higher education accessible and affordable to everyone, how would you do it?" Mind, Thinking and Creativity The Academy has concluded that current pressing global challenges reflect fundamental limitations in prevailing modes of intellectual thinking and analysis. It has called for radical advances in the approach to major social problems from fragmented, disciplinary analysis and piecemeal policies which address each issue as separate and independent of the others and mechanistic systems thinking which links together and aggregates