Inside and Out

Universities and Education for Sustainable Development

Robert Forrant, Linda Silka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780895033611
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351843577
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Two overarching questions permeate the literature on universities and civic engagement: How does a university restructure its myriad activities, maintain its academic integrity, and have a transformative impact off campus? And, who ought to participate in the conversations that frame and guide both the internal restructuring process and the off-campus interactions? The perspective of this book, based on research and projects in the field, is that long-term, sustainable social and economic development requires strategies geared to the scientific, technical, cultural, and environmental aspects of development. Much of the work in this volume challenges traditional university practices. Universities tend to reproduce a culture that rejects direct interaction across traditional academic department boundaries and beyond the campus. Yet, interdisciplinary work is important because it more aptly mirrors what is taking place in the regional economy as firms collaborate across manufacturing boundaries and community organizations and neighbourhood groups work to solve common problems. What is distinctive within the range of scholarship and practice in this volume is the inclination on the part of increasing numbers of professors on more and more campuses to collaborate across disciplinary lines. Universities must persist in the advancement of cross-community, cross-firm, and cross-institutional learning. The learning dynamics and knowledge diffusion generated by collaborative activities and new approaches to teaching can invigorate all phases of learning at the university. In this way, the university advances its activities beyond an indiscriminate approach to development, maximizes the use of its resources, and performs an integrative and innovative role in the cultivation of equitable and sustainable regions. The chapters in this book illustrate the strikingly different and exciting ways in which universities pursue education for sustainability.

SECTION ONE:
University Space

CHAPTER 1

Can Universities Contribute to Sustainable Development?^*

Stephen Viederman

The obscure takes a while to see, the obvious, longer.

—Anonymous

Going to a conference away from home is an exercise in unsustainability. The trip to and from the airport usually requires a car or taxi ride, single occupancy. The flight contributes to global warming and is a microcosm of class structure: first, business, and economy. The crowded highways traversed are multilane, having devoured green space and fertile farmland. Often they are lined with factories or the headquarters of corporations responsible for the manufacturing of the “excessities” that symbolize our modern age and the billboards that urge us to buy more. And these excessities are unequally distributed. The highways to and from the airport are often bordered with urban blight. The occupants of these neighborhoods suffer noise, air pollution, and other social ills not found in the suburbs. This view of the landscape often goes unnoticed because of its familiarity and because the traveler’s thoughts are elsewhere. This view of the world is not what we want for our children, our grandchildren, and ourselves.

This chapter addresses a necessary process for envisioning a sustainable future and presents a brief overview of the meaning of the terms sustainability and sustainable development going well beyond the conventional focus on the environment. It looks at the structure of the institutional setting and particularly the control of disciplines, and departments, and related matters. In addition, constraints affecting knowledge generation for policy needs are addressed, focusing particularly on the different questions and time frames that both the policymakers and the general public place on research. The chapter notes the failure of most institutions to look systematically at their own footprint on sustainability, whether it be in the form of the impacts of their investments, their labor practices, their procurement, their relationship to the communities in which they are located, and the like, and ends with some suggestions about what might come next.

VISION

A vision of a sustainable society is necessary to challenge all institutions in society to create the circumstances that will lead to changes in the institutions themselves and in the society as a whole. Envisioning clarifies goals and the processes of change that are needed. The emphasis on a vision of a desired future is essential because it forces a comparison of an ideal state with the situation that currently prevails or would likely occur if present trends continued with little or no societal intervention. Envisioning a sustainable society is a process with a beginning and no end because new circumstances will continually arise that require attention. The challenge of the process is to create better conditions for ourselves while ensuring that we leave options open for future generations to make the changes they envision as necessary.

Envisioning a sustainable society requires new approaches to understanding and creating change that is systemic and structural, rather than ameliorative. It requires the involvement of a range of people: individuals, groups, and communities that are usually not invited to sit at the decision-making table. It requires a broader democratic and participatory “we” than is often the case. Envisioning is a process for clarifying values, helping to create a deeper understanding of who we are, and at the same time, what we want to be, and what we want to facilitate for the benefit of future generations. Envisioning challenges the acceptance of attainable goals as ends in themselves, forcing formulation of goals that are just and needed, even though at any given point in the process they seem unattainable. The concept of acceptable risk as a part of the process, for example, raises a number of questions: Acceptable to whom?” “Decided upon by whom?” and “With what consequences for whom?” Acceptability is usually predicated on the opinion of external “expertise,” often with conflict among those “experts,” and decision making without consultation with those who are most affected by the risk. Citizens are therefore at the mercy of experts, diminishing their own power to control their communities.

Envisioning is proactive, not a passive acceptance of the present situation. Focusing on root causes of unsustainability rather than just symptoms creates opportunities to plan new courses of action more effectively, thereby avoiding being victims of fate. It requires attention to first principles: what is it we want for ourselves? For our children and their children? For all children? It demands an assessment of the present system of capitalism as a barrier to a just, equitable, and environmentally sound society. It calls for and empowers the search for a new “ism” that would facilitate the goals envisioned.

Envisioning a sustainable society is a social construct that goes against a notion that is central to our ways of thinking, the notion that gives primacy to science and technology as the basis of the solutions for all of human problems. Attention to the technical means of achieving sustainability is important, but cannot become a preoccupation until we know where we are going. There are no formulae to define sustainability, nor are there equations to measure it. Einstein’s observation concerning mathematics applies equally, especially to sustainability: “[T]he laws … as far as they refer to reality, are not certain, and as far as they are certain, do not refer to reality.”

Offered here is an unexceptional personal vision of sustainability that informs the thoughts that follow, underlining the breadth of the changes that are needed well beyond environmental issues. The world envisioned would be a peaceful world in which communities control their own economies and where peoples of different races, classes, ethnicities, ages, and sexual orientation live together learning and benefiting from social diversity. It would be a world in which the air is clean, the water pure, and where neither the poor nor the rich need to be concerned about environmental assaults on their health. It also would be a world where work is satisfying, provides a living wage and pay equity, with good benefits and the right to organize; a world where education would be freely available and that focuses attention on the obligations of citizenship as well as the needs of lifelong learning for pleasure and advancement. Finally, it would be a world where justice, equity, and fairness exist within and among nations and where power is used to enrich, not to diminish people.

SUSTAINABILITY

The terms “sustainable development” and “sustainability” gained prominence in the last decades of the twentieth century as a critique of development models that resulted in the destruction of nature. Governments and intergovernmental organizations established national and international commissions whose reports have long since been buried. Nongovernmental organizations at local, national, and international levels proliferated, countless conferences were held, books and papers published, and Web sites created. Today even the corporate world has accommodated the language of sustainability. The discussion has been sustained, but the world looks much the same as it did before.

The discussion then and now is still largely organized around discrete, though clearly interrelated issues—the environment, women, development, and population. And within these broad areas, the foci are narrow and unconnected. The emphasis on the environment is still foremost and even today the word “sustainability” is usually shorthand for environmental sustainability, for “greening.” Trying to deal with all of the parts of the problem of unsustainability together remains elusive, in part because of the absence of an envisioning process. You cannot get anywhere without knowing where you are going. The problem is also complex and chaotic and thus difficult to confront directly. Our institutions are not structured appropriately. They tend to be organized horizontally with little vertical integration. Raising issues of the whole requires dealing with the systems in which the parts are embedded. This prospect, in turn, challenges too many beliefs and behaviors, raising questions about the use and abuse of power within institutions in the modern world. The political will necessary to reduce the dissonance between creed and deed, as Gandhi described in the mid-twentieth century, does not exist.

Moving toward a vision of sustainability is an extremely complex problem, and there has been little resolution of the key underlying issues. Einstein observed “perfection of means and confusion of ends seems to characterize our age.” Mechanisms to address these questions as a whole, or at a minimum to put the parts together, and ways of creating opportunities for change are lacking. The focus is on details with no assurance that they are the most important details. Without a sense of the whole, there can be no understanding of the interrelationship of the parts. By focusing on the parts rather than the whole, it becomes convenient to avoid explicit attention to what are arguably the two most important and difficult interrelated issues for sustainability and development: the global economy and the distribution of power among the peoples of the world. Sustainability is not a technical problem to be solved. It is ultimately about what a society values, not in the technical sense of economic valuation, but in the sense of human concerns and aspirations.

HIGHER EDUCATION AND SUSTAINABILITY

In his 1974 Nobel acceptance speech, economist Fredrich von Hayek began by observing the irony that economists at that time were being called upon to correct the problems for which they themselves were responsible. Little has changed, and economists are not the only ones at fault.

Higher education will play a role in shaping the vision and practice of a sustainable society for better or worse. It has a responsibility and an obligation for the better. Its graduates will be leaders of countries, corporations, religious institutions, art, thought, science, engineering—people of power. They will also be citizens, great and small, asked to participate in decision making for the commonweal. Its faculty will have access to the halls of power and will be called upon by society for assistance.

Higher educational institutions’ efforts to respond to the challenges of sustainability must begin with an honest institutional assessment of the obstacles they face. Focusing on obstacles is not a counsel of despair, but a necessary first step toward the changes that are necessary. It is also a way of assessing the limits of institutions to respond to the challenge of sustainability. The focus then will be on what can be done in the short term, and the changes that are possible over time.

At a conference to a group of parliamentarians and religious leaders on global education held in Moscow in 1990, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel offered this critique of the education of those Germans who allowed the atrocities against Jews and Russians during World War II.

They [the Germans] did not come from the underworld; some came from some of the best and most prestigious Universities in Germany: they had degrees and even doctorates in medicine, philosophy, jurisprudence and theology. In other words: they were not shielded by their education. What was wrong with it? It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience. Thus in the name of a theory based on conquest and domination, multitudes of men and women, and—woe unto us—children too, were reduced and diminished only to be seen as tools; their lives used as instruments. The sacredness of the human being, the uniqueness of the person, the right of every individual to immortality were negated and discarded at the whim of those who possessed power—either political or intellectual.

What is the relevance of Wiesel’s criticisms of pre–World War II German education as a guide for the discussion of higher education and sustainability today? The world has changed in many ways in the last sixty years. But “conquest and domination” are still all too common, over nature and humans.

Domination and mastery of the environment is a recurrent theme in modern life. Yale’s president, economist Richard Levin, began his inaugural address in October 1993 by quoting Sophocles: “Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none more wonderful than man,” adding that “the chorus sings of humanity’s power over nature.” Continuing, Levin observed, “We celebrate today our University—a monument to the achievement Sophocles extols. We preserve humanity’s achievement [in controlling nature]. We impart an appreciation of that achievement by our teaching and augment it by our research.” But what is the extent and what are the unintended consequences of our efforts to control and manage nature for present and future generations?

In a 1996 conference on philanthropy, James Gibson of the Urban Institute noted that many social problems, like poverty, might now best be thought of as organic to capitalism and not subject to “cure.” Further discussion suggested that over the long haul efforts to deal with social ills should seek equilibrium rather than a cure. If social problems are rooted in the very nature of capitalism, then that is the problem to be solved. This issue was not raised. This at best amoral discussion reflects all too well the concerns expressed by Wiesel that are too common in academia.

WHY CAN’T UNIVERSITIES FOSTER LEARNING AND BEHAVIORAL CHANGE TOWARD SUSTAINABILITY?

The world has problems; universities have disciplines. Inter-, trans-, non-, multidisciplinary approaches are rooted in the disciplines. Sustainability is about the whole, about the sum of and the relationships among the parts of systems. Universities excel at parts, not the whole. The search for sknowledge is defined as that which is researchable. Expertise is valued. But as the eminent microbiologist Erwin Chargoff suggested, where expertise prevails, wisdom vanishes. Can higher education cultivate wisdom as well as it does knowledge?

While president of Columbia University in the 1990s, Michael Sovern observed that the most exciting issues confronting society seemed to fall “at the interstices between the departments,” an admittedly unexceptional observation. But then more than two hundred years after the founding of that university (now 250 years old) and after decades of discussion and debate over “interdisciplinarity,” he and his colleagues could do no better than to suggest that they needed to figure out how to deal with this reality! Derek Bok, who retired from the presidency of Harvard in 1992, observed:

Our universities excel in pursuing the easier opportunities where established academic and social priorities coincide. On the other hand, when social needs are not clearly recognized and backed by adequate financial support, higher education has often failed to respond as effectively as it might, even to some of the most important challenges facing America. Armed with the security of tenure and time to study the world with care, professors would appear to have a unique opportunity to act as society’s scouts to signal impending problems long before they are visible to others. Yet rarely have members of the academy succeeded in discovering emerging issues and bringing them vividly to the public’s attention. What Rachel Carson did for risks to the environment, Ralph Nader for consumer protection, Michael Harrington for problems of poverty, Betty Friedan for women’s rights, they did as independent critics, not as members of a faculty. Universities will usually continue to respond weakly unless outside support is available and the subjects involved command prestige in academic circles. (1990, p. 105)

In March 1994 James E. Welch Jr., GE chair, offered an alternative view of what is possible outside the bonds of academia. He argued that “boundaryless” is an essential operating principle in business. By that comment he meant “piercing the walls of hundred-year-old fiefdoms and empires called finance, en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Inside and Out—What’s It All About?
• Section One: University Space
• Section Two: The Regional and Global Fabric
• Contributors
• Index