Universities are organized to assume uninterrupted growth in enrollments and endowments, steady public funding, an annual ability to inflict tuition hikes on students and their families, everlasting degree programs, vast building operations and permanent commitments to a senior professoriate. Lacking an agile and responsive governance structure, and with fixed costs mounting in a massive physical plant and labor-intensive enterprise, the modern university is brittle when suddenly confronted with changing realities. Academe has trouble responding to wake-up calls--and by the time colleges and universities mobilize with imaginative ideas for new initiatives, it is too late to make a difference. This article discusses how higher education in New England can break the syndrome of recession amnesia. The author emphasizes that the key to the competitiveness of individual institutions, the region and the American academic system as a whole is to maintain their distinctive features, their vitality and connection to the world, and their focus on the myriad needs of students. In order to cure recession amnesia, higher education should recognize their lack of historical perspective, while trying to make sense of their strengths and vulnerabilities in an otherwise perplexing world ahead.