Something big happened. The trouble is it happened in a remote part of Canada so the reverberations are taking some time to reach the rest of us.

What happened is that Richard Homburg, the Executive Chairman of the multi-billion dollar Homburg real estate conglomerate, walked away from negotiations with a university president over a significant donation, and he decided instead to found his own private university.

Hang on, you may say, there is nothing novel in this. Private universities across the United States were founded by private interests with their own money. True. But what we are seeing here is a company starting a specialized university in its own field of business, in this case, Real Estate Development. That is novel, and when the word gets out, people are going to be debating whether it is an evolutionary step.

Universities have been around for about a thousand years and they have taken numerous forms. They have been religious, founded by monks. They have been national, founded by governments. They have been political, founded by political parties. The genus of university that ‘modern man’ associates with the term is the ‘free’ post-Enlightenment university. Today’s universities, both public and private, are broadly of this genus, though there is a variety of species: co-ed, predominantly minority, ‘techs’, etc.

For decades, there has also been a separate genetic cousin adding branches to the university evolutionary tree: the ‘corporate university’. The corporate university is an in-house professional education facility that provides flexible, on-demand training to the company’s own people. Most of the time, its programs don’t lead to the award of degrees, though sometimes, companies outsource their training to universities, which some see as a retrograde step. The Homburg project is different, because it starts from its own expertise that it acquired over decades and delivers education directly to students without needing any middle-man as a ‘knowledge-broker’.

The Homburg project is different, because it seems to be a genetic cross between the ‘corporate university’ and the ‘private university’. From the corporate university, it draws flexibility in delivery and cutting-edge industry knowledge and experience that is targeted and relevant. From the private university it draws from traditions in research and teaching excellence by assembling the best teachers and researchers from around the world, and in granting degrees at the Bachelor and Master levels. Its book deal with Oxford University Press seems to be an early indication of the level of seriousness of this operation.

The Homburg Global Education Project is not like any for-profit, public, corporate, or private university out there. As one might expect of an international company, Homburg is launching simultaneous campus developments in Switzerland and Canada, and linking them both in an online "eCampus Global" portal to enable students from around the world to take its programs. It will offer the Bachelor of Real Estate and the Master of Real Estate programs, with different tracks and concentrations, and the roster of faculty around the world that it has assembled is extremely impressive.

When the news starts to get out, there will be tremors far and wide. This initiative is unique, and unique things are often a threat to the established order.