I was asked recently by Ron Daniels, Penn’s Provost, whom I thought the real winners would be in the kind of flat world Tom Friedman writes about. I told him the institutions that succeeded would be those that became “flat-world contrarians.” Flourishing as a successful contrarian requires both an understanding and, on some level, an embrace of what is being opposed. True contrarians are seldom curmudgeons. Rather than endlessly complaining, a contrarian university and its faculty would have to say and mean something like, “We’re an institution that lets you embrace the connectivity a flat world promises. We’re your anchor, one of those special places that is in but not wholly part of this world.”

A flat world-contrarian’s future would depend on its ability to give people something to hang on to, a mooring or anchor that would let them lean out without falling off the merry-go-round. Universities that came to play this role would have to be resourceful, nimble, entrepreneurial, rich and, above all, wise in the ways of connecting with entities that are not similarly moored or anchored.

Right now the best model of what such an institution might look like is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which has maintained, and indeed increased its standing and independence, even as it has gone about the business of building connections across what the leaders of that institution saw as an increasingly flat educational world. MIT’s most visible thrust has been its OpenCourseWare Project which, starting in 2001, began making all MIT course materials available online free of charge. It is and was an expensive undertaking made possible by funding from two key foundations. Having gotten the money, MIT had the technological know-how to make the project work and a global brand that made it and its Web site international destinations. At the same time, MIT’s culture allowed the institution, in partnership with its faculty, to change an important parameter governing the intellectual property rights of its professors.

My guess is not more than 60 American universities will succeed at becoming flat-world contrarians. The winners will be large, rich, and iconic. They will be engines of basic as well as applied research. Their campuses will continue to be important destinations. Their defining characteristic, the one that will most likely separate them from everyone else, will be the adeptness they exhibit at making connections — with other successful flat-world contrarians and with the emerging educational networks and systems that will teach most undergraduates as well as most graduate students pursing professionally oriented masters degrees.