In my earlier post I set out the idea that universities are of the crisis rather than as is widely understood that external risks are the real threat to them. I have written an earlier blog(Educating Earth Literate Leaders) – if we look back on the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (2002) and many of the other international summits which followed, and reflect on their impact, the overriding conclusion is that political leadership the world over has failed to rise to the challenges of sustainability. And yet it is likely that most of the hundred or so leaders who attended the earth summit would have had a higher education degree from some of the world’s most prestigious universities. This raises some serious questions for our university leaders and their governance structures. Why, as the American academic, David Orr once remarked, is it that the people who contribute most to exploiting poor communities and the Earth’s ecosystems are those with BAs, MScs, and PhDs and not the ‘ignorant’ poor from the South? And why is the illiteracy amongst the world’s politicians as to how the world works as a living system so widespread? Why is it so rare that we encounter in our leaders the qualities needed to enable sustainability: humility, respect for all forms of life and future generations, precaution and wisdom, the capacity to think systemically and critically challenge unethical actions? And more worryingly based on current performance, what hope of improvement is there for future leaders?
The fact that the higher education sector is seriously failing society by producing leaders incapable of addressing our most pressing problems should trigger some critical consideration about the fundamental role of universities in society, based on three key assumptions: If universities are the nursery of tomorrow’s leaders and educate most of the people who develop and manage society’s institutions, then the sector bears “profound responsibilities to increase the awareness, knowledge, technologies, and tools to create a sustainable future”, as the Talloires Declaration (signed by many of the world’s university leaders) stated in 1990 (ULSF, 1990). This clearly implies that graduates of every discipline (whether as engineers, teachers, politicians, lawyers, architects, biologists, banks managers or tourism operators, etc.) will need a sound working knowledge of sustainability.
Yet you only need to read a few university websites to get a sense of the official voices of university leaders and managers symbolised as an enduring rhetoric promoting universities as institutions of noble service particularly regarding their public good in supporting graduate cohorts’ upward social and economic mobility. But dig a bit more deeply into the teaching and learning practice and the curriculum upon which these epistemological processes are based and the social purpose of the university becomes conflicted. As the authors of Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis argue-even a cursory analysis exposes much of this rhetoric as “tropes” which lack any reflexive engagement with the world as it is, and the role and purpose of the universities therein is buried under commercial and self-sustaining neoliberal values that guide the modern university.”
And as Bawden (2008) commented:
There is a strange and inexplicable reluctance by our institutions of higher education across the entire globe, to overtly promote the fact that they are first and foremost, agencies of human and social development .
Bawden argues that ‘project civilisation’ is profoundly fragile – predicated on the stability of planetary systems – and our universities have extraordinary knowledge and capacity to protect it. However, reform in higher education tends to take place in three broad categories, which include soft, or minor reform, major or radical reform, as well as “beyond or transformative reform”. In the context of immense societal complexity and change, what is most needed- is intentional transformative reform of universities’ institutional cultures, curricula and campuses- based on system-wide approaches. Hil,Lyons,and Thompsett(2022) liken this to the “hospice” of a system that is already in decline.
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