The Critical Importance of Higher Education Leadership for a Healthy, Just and Sustainable Society
Anthony D. Cortese, Sc.D.
October 2020
Humanity and Higher Education at an Unprecedented Crossroads
Higher education now has a challenge bigger than any other it has ever faced because humanity is at crossroads without historical precedent. Because of the extraordinary and exponential growth of population and of the technological/economic system, humans have become pervasive and dominant forces in the health and well-being of the earth and its inhabitants. The sum of humanity and the expansive dynamic of industrial capitalism constitute a planetary force comparable in disruptive power to the Ice Ages and the asteroid collisions that have previously redirected Earth’s history.
The crucial question for all of humanity is:
How will we ensure that all current and future humans will have their basic needs met, will live in thriving, just and secure communities, will have economic opportunity in a world that will have nine billion people and that plans to increase economic output 4-5 times by 2050 on a planet whose capacity to support life is more precarious every day?
This is not just an environmental challenge, it is a civilizational and moral challenge bigger than the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan for Europe, the Space Race, and the attempts to eliminate or cure cancer, AIDS, and other chronic illnesses – combined. It is not about saving the planet. The planet has survived 5 major biological extinctions, the last being 65 million years ago in the age of the dinosaurs, and it will survive the 6th being caused by humans. It is about saving civilization by remaking the human presence on earth in a way that allows all present humans to have their health, social and economic needs met while ensuring that future generations can also meet their needs. It is also built on the understanding that all human activity and survival is completely dependent on the earth for all of its resources and key ecosystem services including converting waste products into useful substances.
How Did We Get Here?
The routine business of our civilization is threatening its own survival, and by putting Earth’s living system in jeopardy, it also risks foreclosing the conditions for any civilized life. How did we get here? The cultural operating instructions of modern industrial society are that if we just work a little harder and smarter and let the market forces dominate society, all these challenges will work themselves out. In the industrialized world, we are guided by a myth of human separateness from and domination of nature for our purposes. This myth says that because it has worked in the last three centuries, continued physical-economic growth will increase the quality of life for a significant portion of the world’s population. It contains an implicit assumption that the earth will be the gift that keeps on giving — providing the resources and converting our wastes into useful substances — ad infinitum. This myth assumes that human technological innovation will allow us to ignore planetary limits.
Moreover, we are dominated by linear short-term thinking that makes it difficult to recognize the magnitude of our cumulative actions and the danger of their impacts. Our collective impacts are now global, intergenerational, and prone to rapid, unexpected shifts. For example, greenhouse gas emissions released today will begin to have their most serious effects in 20-30 years and will continue for several centuries. Witness the interdependent, COVID pandemic, disruption of the climate and the economy, the racial and economic injustice, and global political destabilization that has occurred in 2020. Through economic globalization, we are spreading this cultural and economic paradigm even while its hyper-interdependence makes our societies more vulnerable to the growing instability of natural or human systems. Finally, in western industrialized culture, we tend to view increasing material consumption as the principal measure of success, despite its negative effects on health, society, and the environment.
We need a transformative shift in the way we think and act. As Einstein said, “We can’t solve today’s problems at the same level of thinking at which they were created.” We currently view the array of health, economic, energy, political, security, social justice, environmental, and other societal issues we have as separate, competing, and hierarchical when they are really systemic and interdependent. We have a de facto systems design failure. The 21st-century challenges must be addressed in a systemic, integrated, and holistic fashion with an emphasis on creating new and more desirable ways of helping society succeed.
The current state of the world is a prima facie indicator that the current higher education system is reinforcing the unhealthy, inequitable, and unsustainable path that society is pursuing. As David Orr has said – “It is not a problem in education it is a problem of education”. This is not intentional. The structure of higher education and its evolution in the last one and a half centuries is based on and is reinforcing the deep cultural (and therefore hidden) assumptions referred to above. The guiding myth of humans as separate from nature, nature as primarily a source of resources to be utilized and controlled for human purpose, combined with the disciplinary structure of learning and purpose in higher education, is the dominant paradigm in society and in higher education.
The Current Reality in Higher Education
There has been unprecedented, exponential growth in distinct academic programs related to the environmental dimension of sustainability in higher education, especially in the last two decades. Exciting environmental (and now sustainability) studies and graduate programs in every major scientific, engineering and social science discipline, business, law, public health, behavioral sciences, ethics, and religion are abundant and growing.
Progress on campuses modeling sustainability has grown at an even faster rate. Higher education has embraced programs for energy and water conservation, renewable energy, waste minimization and recycling, green buildings, and purchasing, alternative transportation, local and organic food growing, and ‘sustainable’ purchasing - saving both the environment and money, witness the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment with 500 colleges and universities committed becoming carbon neutral and transforming education of their students.
The student environmental movement in the U.S. is the most well-organized, largest, and most sophisticated student movement since the civil rights and anti-war movement of the 1960s. And higher education environmental efforts have become publicly visible to a degree that was unimaginable a decade ago. These developments represent one of the most encouraging trends in higher education innovation since World War II.
Unfortunately, higher education is doing a poor job on the health, social and economic dimensions of sustainability. The overwhelming majority of graduates know little about the importance of sustainability or how to lead their personal and professional lives aligned with sustainability principles. Moreover, a large number of the excellent and exciting sustainability-oriented innovations in higher education have been led by (1) individual groups (students, a subset of the faculty, a subset of the business and operations staff - often working together), (2) have primarily focused on the environmental dimension of sustainability and (3) have largely focused on educating environmental and sustainability professionals within the framework of existing academic disciplines. Few have been integrated with social efforts such as civic engagement, social justice, economic development, poverty alleviation, and human rights. With a few exceptions, sustainability, as an aspiration for society, has not been a central institutional goal, or lens for determining the success of higher education institutions.
Higher Education’s Future Role
It is clear that today’s and tomorrow’s businesses, government, and professionals - architects, engineers, attorneys, business leaders, scientists, urban planners, policy analysts, cultural and spiritual leaders, teachers, journalists, advocates, activists, and politicians - will need new knowledge and skills that only Higher Education can provide on a broad scale.
Higher education has a social contract with society: In exchange for tax-free status, academic freedom, and the ability to receive public and private resources, higher education is to provide the knowledge and educated citizenry to create a thriving, civil and sustainable society in perpetuity. Higher education is one of the few institutions in society that is designed for the long-term good of society – the maintenance, renewal, and expansion of civilization.
Higher education prepares most of the professionals who develop, lead, manage, teach, work in, and influence society’s institutions, including the most basic foundation of elementary, middle school, and secondary education. Higher education has been a crucial leverage point in making a modern advanced civilization possible for an unprecedented number of people in almost every important way and will be even more important in a world that is rapidly expanding and interdependent. In addition, college and university campuses are microcosms of the rest of society – they are like mini-cities and communities that mirror society. Society looks to higher education to solve current problems, anticipate future challenges, develop innovative solutions, and model the action and behavior that society must take to continue to evolve in a positive direction.
What if higher education were to take a leadership role in helping to make this a reality?
A college or university would operate as a fully integrated community that models social, economic, and biological sustainability itself and in its interdependence with the local, regional and global community. In many cases, we think of teaching, research, operations, and relations with local communities as separate activities; they are not. Because students learn from everything around them, these activities form a complex web of experience and learning.
All parts of the college or university system are critical to achieving a transformative change that can only occur by connecting head, heart, and hand. The educational experience of graduates must reflect an intimate connection among curriculum and (1) research; (2) understanding and reducing any negative ecological and social footprint of the institution; and, (3) working to improve local and regional communities.
What if the educational experience of all students is aligned with the principles of sustainability outlined above? To achieve this…
The content of learning would reflect interdisciplinary systems thinking, dynamics, and analysis for all majors and disciplines with the same lateral rigor across, as the vertical rigor within, the disciplines.
The context of learning would change to make human/environment interdependence, values, and ethics a seamless and central part of teaching of all the disciplines, rather than isolated in programs for specialists, or in special courses or modules.
The process of education would emphasize active, experiential, inquiry-based learning and real-world problem solving on the campus and in the larger community.
Higher education would practice and model sustainability. A campus would "practice what it preaches" and model economically and environmentally sustainable practices in its operations, planning, facility design, purchasing, and investments, and tie these efforts to the formal curriculum.
Conclusion
Many inside and outside of higher education argue that achieving climate neutrality and sustainability as a society and getting higher education to lead this effort is impossible. But we must make that which seems impossible, inevitable. If we continue business as usual, today’s students and their children will experience the worst effects of climate disruption and other large unsustainable means of meeting human needs and will find themselves in a world with greatly diminished prospects for a good quality of life, peace, and security. We are also faced with the greatest intergenerational equity challenge in modern history. The earth does not recognize how hard it is for us humans to change. It will respond to the physical changes we cause on its own schedule and in its own ways. It doesn’t have the cognitive ability to decide to wait for us to figure out how we can change to preserve our way of life and ourselves.
The opportunity is for us to have a vision for the kind of healthy, just, and sustainable world and mobilize to make it a reality. To quote Benjamin E. Mays, former president of Morehouse College and mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King said: "The tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal, the tragedy lies in having no goal to reach." Richard Cook, who retired in 2008 as president of Allegheny College — one of the founders of the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment — wrote:
“I liken this pledge to President Kennedy’s promise to get men to the moon and back within the decade. Neither he nor a cadre of engineers and scientists knew exactly how this would be accomplished or if, indeed it could be. But making a bold pledge to accomplish a strategically important end spurred attention, resources, talent, and urgency to a lofty goal that would be difficult to attain. In much the same way, the Commitment to becoming climate-neutral institutions will spur development and accountability, and will surely, in most cases, produce more and better results in a shorter period of time than something short of a specific target. The collective voice of higher education can spotlight our sincere concern and commitment to action in ways that few if any other sectors can. We have largely provided the research that has highlighted the climate concern; we also can provide many of the solutions. If the colleges and universities don’t lead, who will?”
Anthony D. Cortese, ScD
Co-Founder, Intentional Endowments Network, Second Nature, AASHE
https://www.intentionalendowments.org/anthony_cortese
617-549-4736
*Excerpts from publications and speeches of the author.
Footnotes:
"Benjamin E. Mays National Memorial." Morehouse College. Web. 15 July 2010. <http://www.morehouse.edu/about/chapel/mays_wisdom.html>.