Posted by Gordon Freedman, Blackboard's Vice President Education Strategy
Although they may not mean to, universities orient societies in certain directions, just as much as schools prepare young citizens. Our education systems, in the words of the late New York University thinker, Neil Postman, don’t prepare students for life per se. They actually create “new publics.” They are the holders of the society in waiting, helping to create the young adults who will take over in time.
This view raises some interesting and disturbing questions. If I were among that public-to-be, as are my children, I would have some hard questions for my elders and their great institutions. Everywhere you look there are messes: finance, manufacturing, the world economy, the environment, addiction to fossil fuel, violence and bloodshed. And the list goes on. Where, I might ask, does the university play in this world?
Are the august bodies (really collections of faculty loosely controlled by administrations) in any way complicit in the current meltdown? And, if they are, are they at all responsible for helping to find new ways out as opposed to beating a path back to the same door we are collectively exiting? Certainly, business schools turned out MBAs and finance grads that populated the credit-gone-wild world, who did much of the bidding, and much of the fee taking, for elder bosses intent on fueling the fire who, themselves, graduated from many of the best universities.
The young middle managers and hyper-workaholics also populated the middle and upper reaches of the great corporate machines that make (made) the cars, planes, and buildings that moved and housed the phenomenal growth we just witnessed. They also populated and promoted the luxury brands that so much defined the magnetic attraction to all that glittered. While the post modernists, who occupy the same universities, can dismiss as a failed set of narratives the consumerism at any cost mentality and the banal need to outshine your neighbor, can they help create the next narrative? Is there one?
Many would argue that the university is simply a container, a crucible in which society’s gears are studied, replicated and improved upon, where many tiny levers are examined and toyed with from genetics to literary criticism. In this environment the university, in the common view, is both blameless for society’s ills and not responsible for generating its next manifestations. I don’t think this position is sustainable in the globalized society now in a painful search for a center of gravity.
Most institutions of higher education in the world are financed by citizens through tax dollars put in the trust of governments who pay it back out to institutions of higher education. In turn, those institutions provide both the grounding for civil society – teachers, doctors, nurses, civil engineers, criminal justice workers, lawyers – as well as those who tinker with and fan the flames of change – researchers, economists, finance gurus, technologists, bio-engineers, and political scientists.
The trust that passes in tax dollars from the employed citizens and solvent corporations to government and then to education is an unseen path where in many cases the largest amount of wealth passes from private hands to public purposes. If this is the case, the question remains is how is this investment made and what are the expectations?
The taxes of every fast food employee who may never walk on a campus are supporting students who go to schools, colleges and universities around the world. In that sense, the debate is not “academic” or an intellectual plaything, it is profoundly serious. As a result, I believe universities especially have not only a responsibility to help envision a sustainable future but they have a duty to do so.
If you want to make it more direct, each faculty member, if they value not only their current academic freedom, but their ability to retire in old age, another form of freedom, they should think hard and fast about how they can contribute to the public good. An odd protest here or there or a solidarity rally against a foreign government is not enough. Re-construction in an uncertain world is an art form, uncertain, sometimes painful, but rewarding in its effort. Criticism is easier, it flows down hill easily, and it incites others. But the herd will not build tomorrow.
Together with young people, both in school and out, the university needs to be a place that questions conventions, pretenses, and looks at the questions of how we might construct a variety of future paths through a myriad of problems, large and small, in order to have some methods to deal with the uncertainty that is now our lot. At a recent gathering of higher education leaders and government officials, conclusions were drawn that we live in a world that is now governed by instability and fear, a time for belt-tightening and weathering of the storm.
If the storm subsides, it is unlikely that we will be on the same shore. I’m not sure that the world we will return to can be built on the foundation that we once existed upon.
How, then, can young minds, hyper-connected to their peers, inside the institution, be focused with their learned elders on the opportunity and responsibility to construct a grounded but forward-looking future? The young have all the tools at their fingertips, literally, and much of the energy necessary. The worst we could do is force them to re-create the past. The best we could do, is cooperate with them to explore the types of future that will allow adults to retire and young people to inspire us with their visions of a better world.
This will require a thoughtful university, one that sees itself as more than a collection of individual faculty organizing their singular careers. Many an administrator will lament that faculty will never rise above their self interest. I think at the root of great leadership is the ability to illuminate how enlightened self-interest shines the only light possible for a future that can hedge against instability and fear. The worst we could do not now is keep our heads down and pretend that it will all go away.
