history

Revisiting the Challenges Facing Canadian Higher Education: The Limits of Crisis-Thinking

By Sharon Stein UBC Are our individual and institutional responses appropriately calibrated to the scale and complexity of the moment we are actually in? After all, we cannot “solve” planetary and geopolitical challenges at the level of curriculum, technology, or individual resilience. We cannot, and arguably should not, seek to extend an extractive system indefinitely.Continue reading “Revisiting the Challenges Facing Canadian Higher Education: The Limits of Crisis-Thinking”

Community Resilience

Battered by the storm, Cornwall was emblematic of our institutional systemic failure to confront a rapidly changing reality. In one of the richest countries in the world, entire communities lost power for weeks, and running water for days. Had the British government addressed climate change, and made contingency plans for these mega-storms, which will onlyContinue reading “Community Resilience”

The Coming of the Ecological University

“Universities have been with us on this Earth for at least one thousand years and will surely be with us in the future; perhaps so long as there is life on this planet that has any well-being. There is now something in not just the name of the institution but in the idea of the university that seemsContinue reading “The Coming of the Ecological University”

The Valley that Changed the World, and Could Do So Again.

Transforming the Derwent Valley for a Regenerative Future May 10, 2024 Image by Derwent Valley MillsAuthors: Jonny Norton, Stephen Martin, Chris Ives — School of Geography University of NottinghamNestled within the picturesque landscapes of Derbyshire, England, lies the Derwent Valley — a valley once pulsating with the relentless energy of the Industrial Revolution. From theContinue reading “The Valley that Changed the World, and Could Do So Again.”

THE URGENT NEED FOR AN ACADEMIC REVOLUTION IN OUR UNIVERSITIES

By NICHOLAS MAXWELL- PHILOSOPHER We might put the matter like this. Humanity faces two fundamental problems of learning: learning about the universe and us and other forms of life as a part of the universe; and learning how to create a genuinely good, civilized, wise world. We have solved the first problem of learning. WeContinue reading “THE URGENT NEED FOR AN ACADEMIC REVOLUTION IN OUR UNIVERSITIES”

The right have hijacked Englishness. Can it be reclaimed?

I spent Saturday morning listening to an exceptional former Green MP Caroline Lucas talk about England and being English and how distorted our electoral system has become. She is a formidable and eloquent analyst of how our system has become a bandwagon for the right and how we might change this dynamic by transforming manyContinue reading “The right have hijacked Englishness. Can it be reclaimed?”