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”, and of 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 driver 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 the whole set of semi-independent, yet tightly linked and interacting systems of “academia” 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, the ideas central to this system are among those significantly shaping the media encounters, speeches, YouTube video-clips, innovations and ideas influencing the world at any given point in time.  

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, lecture, teach and learn–a resource rare in the world. And with the gift of space, luxurious space with books and equipment and nooks and crannies inviting connection, and often rolling green hills, and gardens, or mountains and seas. The loveliest of settings, found or created.

Of course, what is expected in return, of those so “liberated” in time and privileged in resources, is hard work and high performance. Yet even the work confers still greater privilege, for it does 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 workers–the thinkers, writers, artists, teachers, researchers–are as it turns out, the “coral” whose leavings are the house the next generation inhabits, its structures taken for granted 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 our best chance? What is its obligation, and ability, to help 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? 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 move into new ways of being, then every single institution must bring its full powers to the task and must change, often in fundamental ways–for arguably all carry some part of the problem, and thus 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.

It seems many fields are already asking key questions, and finding valuable answers, but these lines of inquiry and effort are as yet 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. But the need is to bring these efforts from the perimeter to the core and to make them central to the work of each field. We must respond as in an emergency–for surely that is what we are in, as serious a global emergency as can be imagined. 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 yet in this urgency of focus, and depth of change, we must still be wary not to 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. 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 some ways of treating each other well, woven into the fabric of many cultures as critical to survival, have worn thin in contemporary times and need to be reclaimed if we are indeed to benefit from the full repertoire of human experience and wisdom.

In these postings, I am exploring whether there are any conceptions of a livable future that seem to be yet within our reach, and by what means, and what capacities would be needed of us to realize these possibilities, and how we might gain those capacities widely enough and soon enough to make the difference. And then, finally and in particular, what role higher education would have to play in developing these capacities, what changes to its aims, its content, its reward systems, and its protocols would be needed–and how these might be achieved–if it is to help enable the survival–and transformation–of our world

Even as we seek answers on many fronts, this blog 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, and all the suffering these times of breakdown cannot but incur. And yet also another place to seek out what 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.