Tony Cortese, Transforming Higher Education
Dr. Cortese is Co-founder and Senior Fellow of the Crane Institute of Sustainability and the Intentional Endowments Network. He has been actively engaged in public policy and educational transformation on climate change and other large-system sustainability challenges for 40 years. He founded Second Nature, the Boston-based advocacy organization committed to promoting sustainability through higher education, along with U.S. Senator John Kerry, Teresa Heinz Kerry, and Bruce Droste. He served as Second Nature’s president from March 1993-August 2012.
Maddie: What spurred your interest and engagement in public policy and educational transformation on climate change and other large-system sustainability challenges?
Tony: Higher education has a social contract with society to provide the knowledge and the graduates that will lead us to a healthy, just, and sustainable society. Higher education’s primary reason for existence is to advance and maintain civilization. After going through the education system and being involved in the work that I did, I observed that the way we educate people is a major cause of our societal problems. The people that are leading us down an unhealthy, inequitable, and unsustainable path as human beings are coming out of the best colleges, universities, and professional schools. It is not a problem in education, it is a problem of education. Fundamentally, the higher education system is designed to mirror and advance the current way in which society is organized. But the current way in which society is organized IS unsustainable.
M: Education for Sustainability - what does it mean to transform the process, content, and practice of higher education?
T: 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 a society 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.
M: And how could this be achieved?
T: 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 the 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.
M: What were your youth and early life like, and why did you pursue this work? What events and relationships in your young life spurred an interest in sustainability?
T: got into this work because I grew up in an inner-city, Italian American neighborhood where everyone was an immigrant. My father was an immigrant from Italy. They all came here with very little education, no money, trying to seek a better life. We lived in what you would call tenement houses. I went to a public bathhouse until age eight because we didn't have running hot water inside the house. Interestingly enough, we never felt poor, because everybody else was in the same boat. The primary goal of our parents and grandparents was to make sure we became educated and got good jobs so that we could make it in society. My father had a 3rd-grade education and worked in a factory making shoes. All my parents wanted us to do were be good, religious people (we were Catholic). I had two uncles one a priest and the other a missionary bishops in Honduras. Both were Franciscans; so when the opportunity came to learn about St. Francis, religion, and ecology with Fr. Thomas Berry and Dr. Elisabetta Ferrero I jumped on it. Jumping back before I understood these ideas as a child, we couldn't go swimming in Boston harbor. At age eight, they stopped us from doing it - the air pollution was horrible because there was so much soot in the air and particles and gasses from industry power plants and automobiles. I was lucky to go to Boston Latin School, the oldest secondary school in the country formed as a prep school for Harvard in 1635, and was eventually the first public high school in the US. After that, I went to university at Tufts. Getting into a good college was was my ticket to a better life. When I got there, I was good at math and science, so I was interested in engineering and the environment. I remember answering President Kennedy's call to public service in 1960 - when he famously said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." I thought, "What better thing could I do than prevent and solve many environmental and public health problems in society?"
M: How did this propel you into a 50-year career in public policy and educational transformation on climate change and other large system sustainability?
T: After getting my first two degrees in civil and environmental engineering, I went to work for the Federal EPA in 1970, to work on the country’s seminal environmental legislation. I also came from a public health tradition and understood that the environment had a negative impact on people's health. I wanted to do research, pass laws, and help people see there are better ways to have a good society that would not cause any of the environmental or social public health challenges. I also got a master's degree from Tufts, and the EPA sent me to get my doctorate in public health at the Harvard School of Public Health. Soon after graduation, I came to Massachusetts to lead The Department of Environmental Protection under two different governors. During that time I was frustrated that I couldn't be more effective in helping people see there were different and better ways for people to live, run the economy that would not harm people's health or the environment, or to live in harmony with the life support system. That's when I began to realize that no matter what laws or regulations we passed to deal with environmental problems, we got the same response from many people that it couldn't be done. It was assumed that in trying to protect the environment, you were going to ruin the economy, that there would be no innovation in industry or the government by trying to think and operate differently.
That led me back into higher education, to transform the way higher education taught, operated, conducted research, and invested money. I felt that higher education should be the model for the rest of society. I ended up doing a lot of this work as a dean at Tufts, where I built these principles into the teaching and operations there. Then, Senator John Kerry and I set up a non-profit organization called Second Nature to bring this work to other colleges and universities He was the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts when I was running the Department of Environmental Protection, and we worked to get the first international agreement on acid rain in 1983, seven years before the clean air act of 1990. That agreement was between the United States and the eastern Canadian provinces because acid rain was such a serious issue, particularly in the eastern half of the United States, and all concentrated in the northeast, from Virginia through Maine and into Canada. He and I decided to found this organization because we wanted to spread the idea of creating a world that would work for everybody.
M: Can you tell us more about Second Nature?
T: Second nature was founded on two things, the first being that the life support system had to remain intact, and the second was that it is our responsibility for future generations to make sure that we are helping people get what they need in the present without compromising the needs of future generations. We created the organization and started working with colleges and universities across the country to help them think about how to change their curriculum, operations, outreach to local communities, and investing. During that time period, I realized that higher education wasn't doing enough, even though there was an explosion of interest in changing the curriculum and doing all kinds of wonderful things on the campuses and in the communities. In 2006 the climate crisis emerged publicly in a big way. I approached a dozen university presidents and other leaders to see if they would make the commitment to being carbon neutral to set an example for society. By 2012, we had 500 colleges and universities that had developed solid commitments to becoming carbon neutral.
The major challenge we had was that the schools were willing to think about modifying their curricula, committing to trying to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and push all sorts of recycling and environmental programs for energy and water conservation, but they weren't willing to look at how they were investing their endowments. he endowments. In 2013, Bill Mickibben noted author and Middlebury College faculty member made public a strong scientific analysis that demonstrated we needed to get society off fossil fuels, and that about 80% of the fossil fuels already in the ground need to remain in the ground to avert the existential climate crisis. Virtually every college and university was invested in oil, coal, and gas and was investing in companies that wanted to extract all of that. There was a huge student movement to get schools to “practice what they preach” and align their actions for the good of society. As a result, several college presidents approached me about providing some support to schools to help them make a transition in investing for a low carbon, equitable and just economy for all. My partner, Georges Dyer, left Second Nature worked with schools, consultants, the investment industry, and NGO leaders to create the Intentional Endowments Network (https://www.intentionalendowments.org/) in 2014 to fill this need. Today, led by Georges, IEN has over 200 member organizations and institutions in higher education, the investment industry, foundations, and others pursuing an intentional path for investment in a better society. But more must be done. It is time to accelerate this process and it is the reason for participating in the SSGN because the magnitude of the societal challenge demands that we embrace spirituality to drive the individual and policy action to make it happen.