Higher Education
Higher education, world round, has a key role in determining what people believe to be possible, desirable, credible and worth talking, thinking or learning about. Directly or indirectly, it substantially determines the skills, horizons, limitations, rules, and assumptions of every profession in the world, what is seen as good practice, and, up to a point, who deserves to be hired, promoted, and deferred to. It largely determines whose research gets funded and whose questions and facts and interpretations are taken seriously. It is a primary determinant of who shows up on the air as a pundit whose views on the world are listened to as those of an “expert”–not to mention what they say (or don’t say).
Higher education effectively sets the content and the bar for all of K-12, as well, and thus significantly affects who will be seen as successes or “having potential” and who as mediocrities or failures. As much by the models it sets as by its explicit requirements, it also largely determines who will teach, what they will teach, and how they will teach. And right up there, alongside money and power, higher education selects what cultures and markers of class will most often influence the course of things–what language and accents, what demeanor and style, what kinds of knowledge and discourse.
Through its central role in determining research agendas, funding, and reputation, moreover, it is the main source of the raw ideas, core understandings, and advanced concepts that make wealth, drive corporations, determine policy, shape design, and fuel the international competition for technological and workforce superiority.
By ‘higher education’ here, I must add, I do not mean only campuses, with their faculty and students, but a whole set of semi-independent, but tightly linked and interacting systems that reach around the world in an increasingly integrated global “reputation economy”. Its components include professional associations, informal networks, government and organizational policies, oversight agencies, academic publishers, journals, books, and sources of funding and scholarship, along with their conferences, promotions, scholarships, admissions and graduation, curricular requirements, certifications and diplomas, and all manner of rewards and punishments. And by extension, of course, this system now encompasses as well the media encounters, speeches, YouTube video-clips, and ideas whose influence can spread rapidly around the world via the global systems that make up higher education.
Nor does the impact end with the setting of the terms of discourse and the conferring of authority. Higher education also privileges some subset of society with the gift of time–full time–to study, create, inquire, think, discuss, test, observe, write, teach and learn–a resource rare in the world. And of space, luxurious space with books and equipment and nooks and crannies inviting connection, and often rolling green, and gardens, or mountains and seas. The loveliest of settings found or created.
Not that what is expected in return, from those so “liberated”, is not in its turn highly demanding work. But their work in the end holds still greater privilege, for it they, mostly, who in the end shape or promote the theories and insights and facts that create the conceptual world we all come to take for granted. For these, thinkers, writers, artists, teachers, researchers, turn out to be the “coral” whose leavings are the house the next generation inhabits, its structures unremarked and all the more influential for that. As was once famously remarked by John Maynard Keynes,
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economists.”
Human Survival
What then is–or could be, or should be–the role of such a potent and far reaching system of systems in securing for us the capacities we need if we are to face up to the challenges of the coming decades with the best chance? What is its obligation, and ability, to build up in our society the understanding, the knowledge, the skills, and the attitudes that we need to save the planet and ourselves? How do its current concepts and practices work to those ends? What else, or more, is needed? And by what changes might it the better meet these needs? And by what means might such changes–such deep transformations–be realized?
In short, in what ways is higher education part of the problem, and in what ways must it be part of the solution?
If our species is to pull back from the brink in time, if it’s to find its way into new ways of being, then every single institution must bring its full powers to the task and must change, often in the most fundamental of ways–for arguably all carry some part of the problem, and all some potential for the solution. And, so also does each and every profession have some role in what has been going wrong–and now also some distinctive potential for getting it right.
As far as I can see, many fields are asking the key questions, and many are finding the critical answers, but these lines of inquiry and effort are as yet still found mostly at the margins–elective courses, unfunded research, special topics that round out the “core requirements” of the discipline, a teach only if time permits relationship. The need is to respond as in an emergency–for surely that is what it is, as serious a global emergency as can be imagined–by bringing these potentials the forefront as quickly as is humanly possible. Not in a panic, not rashly, but systematically–achieving promptness not by rush but by an abosolute focus of attention, society wide, each domain asking itself: “How can we best help? Now!”
And in this urgency of focus, and depth of change, we must also be wary to not throw out all that is old, for much of what is “established” carries the long wisdom of our species, some of it needed more than ever now. Each aspect must be studied carefully, debated and dialogued about in a spirit of intense purposefulness joined with amity. or distort what is Nor should all established ways be overturned; many of them are essential to the health of society as they encode the learnings of generations as to what works in society, especially contemporary society, and what does not. And, conversely, many ways long since learned by humans as critical to our welfare, and common place in human life, have fallen away in contemporary times and need to be reclaimed if we are indeed to benefit from the entire repertoire of human experience and wisdom.
In these postings, I am exploring whether there any conceptions of a livable future that are within reach, and by what means, and what capacities are needed of us if we are to have a chance, and how we might gain those capacities widely enough and soon enough. And then, finally and in particular, what role higher education must play in ensuring these capacities, what changes to it are needed, and how these might be achieved, it it is to help enable the survival–and transformation–of our world
Even as we seek answers on many fronts, here is one of the places to raise helpful questions, share insights, information, tools, strategies, and solutions-. And here also a place to support each other in the grieving for all that is lost or cannot be saved, in all the suffering these times of breakdown and maybe, only maybe, transformative breakthroughs must cost. We can help each other be realistic without giving way to despair, and re-energize and re-focus each other when overwhelm threatens. We can inspire each other with well grounded hope, from stories of what is working, already, or shows great promise, and together distill from these stories the essential lessons that can guide our efforts.
In all of this, we can act with compassion towards ourselves, each other and all out there caught in this world that we have not chosen, but that we now must change, taking full responsibility after the fact for what we could not have known would occur. Here we can hear each other out and listen into the words, and worlds, of others such insights as our very diversity of outlooks may at first obscure. Together we can reinforce the emerging discovery of these times of lightening fast, world-wide communication, that when coupled with mutual care, such diversity becomes in one of our greatest assets, as we take on a challenge no generation has faced before–a chance not only to survive, but to reshape our world to one closer to the justice and mercy we seek, sheer necessity opening the way to changes never before possible.