historically the main type of organisation sustained across generations is the university
-of course this isnt separate
from how a place organises its whole education, valuation of youth as next generation
historically this has been peculiarly
linear- the state lets you have one shot - in us parlance you join in kindergarten age 5-6 ; you go through 12 grades of classrooms;
examinations test whether you should go on to college
scots like adam smith first to see the age of machines and
humans questioned --wouldnt life long learning become ever more important why would anyone design a static system when life
would require more and more adaptation- in 20200 we are suffering in every community becuase smiths queation hasnt been transparently
debated durung first 26 decades of man and machine- if we dont get back to empowering youth to be the sdg generation by 2030
chances we ever will invest in preventio extinction go below even money and exponentially lower - talk about fiddlin while
rome burns- where civilsation once fell separately tech means we all fall down - as hg wells put it - civilisation is a race
between education and collapse
why in 2020 do we still abuse youth the way british empire did by 100% theory teaching
-why not young adolescece practical apprenticeships -from coding to arts to language translation to last mile service experiential
learning is essentilal; why does the classroom remain a monpopoy of examing individuals in expert siloes instead of practsing
co-creative teamwork, worldwide searching and diversity deep community building where local big data is youth's great pathway to un sdgs, our one chance to design
humansai in time
2:36:38NOW PLAYING
On July 8, 2020,
the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI) hosted this special event alongside the United Nations ...
transcript extract 80.40 - with covid and other 2020 crises, we are
where we are, not only because of politics and capitalism, but at the root of it all is us the universities- we are universally
inadequate to what lies ahead in terms of the future of our species and our relationship to our beautiful planet which we
are all dependent on -let me outline 5 inadequacies
1 we are inadequate in terms of our self-awareness-
institutions of higher edu of the net outcome of our design – why do we have business schools that are teaching economic
models that are working against our own sustainability, why do we have a lack of communication between chemists and biologists
and economists and engineers and philosophers and historians and everyone else...
83:18
historians
and everyone else who sit inside in university environments arguing
83:24
with each other in ways
that are not just failing intellectual development but
83:28
are in some ways inane? And so we have never
thought ourselves,
83:35
we've never been adequately focused on our own self-awareness to understand
83:41
that
in fact our highly disciplinary design, as Jeff Sachs indicated, our
83:46
highly structured
way of doing things, our way in which theories evolve, our
83:50
ways in which faculty are recognized, the
ways in which knowledge is advanced, the
83:55
net outcome of all of that is exactly where
we are in terms of a non- sustainable trajectory,
83:59
the non-sustainable trajectory that we're
on is
84:03
a product of us
the failure of university sefl-awareness/ consciousness. Point number one.
Point number two: that same university
84:10
enterprise,
that same higher education enterprise, is inadequate in terms
84:15
of its production of
systems-level tools. We're an observer. We're obsessed with
84:22
reductionism. We're obsessed with the belief
that somehow if we can only
84:26
understand everything down to the atomic scale, if we could only understand
84:31
everything
at the genetic and sub-genetic mechanism, that somehow we would
84:37
be able to find the solution
to all things. And so the answer is, no,
84:41
reductionism is not the method by which we
will gain an understanding of the
84:46
interconnectedness of the systems of the planet and the role of humans.
It's only
84:50
through our ability to emerge systems-level thinking of equal
84:55
intellectual
stature and of equal intellectual value. Third, our
85:01
universities and our higher education systems
in the United States and in
85:05
other parts of the world are completely inadequate in terms of their
85:08
intellectual
diversification, their cultural diversification, their socioeconomic diversification,
85:13
their lack of recognition
of indigenous cultures and
85:18
indigenous knowledge, the dismissal of entire cultural paradigms,
all around
85:26
this notion of somehow there being one path and one trajectory and one route
85:31
forward.
Well, there isn't. And this lack of diversification, lack of women in
85:37
science, technology,
engineering, and math, lack of cultural diversification at
85:43
universities which is actually accelerating
not decelerating. That
85:47
lack of diversification is accelerating if you look around the world,
is in fact
85:52
limiting our overall intellectual contribution. We have a narrower and
85:57
narrower
intellectual contribution ,not a broader and broader intellectual
86:01
contribution. So that's
the third factor that I think is a key part of the design
86:06
limits. I think forth, and I would probably
rank
86:10
this actually first, universities really don't care as institutions about much of
86:14
anything.
They care about bringing in faculty. They care about hiring faculty.
86:19
They care about
having students. They care about their budgets. They care about
86:23
arguing with the government
to get more money. But they don't really care
86:26
about sustainable outcomes as an institution.
They do not take activist
86:32
positions, intellectual activist positions, as Jeff has built his
career
86:36
around, and some of the rest of us have been fighting for decades. We just
86:40
sit
back and say, "Well, we did what we could do. We educated the people we could
86:43
educate. We put
out the theories that we could put out, and
86:46
we're really sorry that the politicians are
too stupid or or too
86:51
lazy or businesses are too greedy or too selfish." And so this
notion of not taking
86:57
some sense of responsibility, we don't realize that it is in fact
our own lack
87:03
of transdisciplinary capability, our own lack of inadequate, our own
lack of
87:09
diversification. It's our own lack of systems-level thinking, it's our own
87:13
obsession
with reductionism that actually has brought us to this point. So
87:18
when we look out and
we're concerned about rapidly rising CO2 levels or we're
87:21
concerned about the overwhelming human consumption,
and a manifestly negative
87:28
overwhelming consumption of fresh water, or the elimination of the
entire fishing
87:33
stock or conservation disruptions on a global
87:37
scale
of geological time, we don't realize that that we're responsible for
87:43
that. If you take
responsibility—if you know you've contributed to something and it's not
87:47
going
well, if you're a responsible person or a responsible institution, you
87:51
change what you're
doing. We don't have much change in what we're doing.
87:54
Fifth on my list is, universities are archaic,
at least in the European model,
88:01
archaic, slow, non-adaptable, non-technologically sophisticated
88:05
institutions.
We're not moving at the speed of climate change. We're not moving
88:11
at the speed of complexity,
of complexification. We're too slow. We have
88:17
no sense of time. We might argue about something
for 15 years and in the same
88:22
15 years the Ross Ice Shelf cracked off of Antarctica and led to some
88:27
massive
change in the in the ocean circulation cycle and thus impacting
88:34
climate etcetera, etcetera.
So the five points here: inadequate self-awareness,
88:38
inadequate emergence of systems-level thinking,
wholly inadequate
88:42
diversification of the university itself, no sense of moral duty or
moral
88:46
responsibility as institutions, and inadequate speed and adaptability. If we
88:51
don't
change those things, there's not going to be any climate adaptation or
88:55
climate change.
There's not going to be movement back towards a sustainable
88:59
trajectory because we're not producing the
people, the ideas, the tools, the
89:04
mechanisms, the devices, the theories, the assumptions—the
young students who
89:08
are just presenting, they get this. They understand that they enter
a university
89:12
which is in fact an archaic institution, incapable of having self-awareness
89:17
relative
to where we're headed. So what are we doing at my institution arizona state, we've
89:22
done everything
and then some, and still it's a slow slog. We've built the Global
89:28
Futures Laboratory, the
Global Institute of Sustainability. We're
89:31
dramatically lowering our carbon footprint.
We have thousands and
89:34
thousands of students. We change the design of engineering. We changed
parts
89:38
of the design of our business schools. We built a new school on the Future of
89:41
Innovation
and Society, a new School of Sustainability, and we're still moving
89:47
too slow. And so I think
the point I'd like to make to
89:50
the audience here is, let's listen to these students. They have a
sense, they
89:54
have an awareness, and they are able to see immediately upon entry into our
89:59
bureaucratic
institutions that we're inadequate to the assignment and we
90:06
ought to take that as a serious, serious criticism.
Now let me tell you
90:09
what's happening right now. So right now, and COVID sort of expresses
this, we are
90:14
largely as colleges and universities place-based institutions, driven
where we
90:21
think that excellence is a function of who we exclude, and this is true all over
90:24
the
world, where our structure, our technology, our flexibility, our
90:29
adaptability are completely
inadequate. So my message to ministers, to UN leaders,
90:35
to SDGN leaders, to higher education leaders,
to students, to faculty, is that
90:40
let's shake it up. It is time to shake the foundation of the universities
and
90:45
have them raise their hand and say, "Yes. We want to be responsible for the
90:50
climate
outcome of our planet, for our species outcome, for the
90:56
sustainability of our species." And to
do that we're going to have to change
91:00
everything down to the root. So I think that's
about 12 minutes and I'll
91:05
stop there.
91:13
Ok. Thank you, President Crow. I like the way you framed it because this
========
views
of mandela on relationship between educational and staye yransformation are a bit unclear to me- i am aware that he backed
africa's first attempt at a new university led by taddy blecher- lemding his name to a coalition linking the university to
"mandela extranet"- by this time early 2000s mandela was more of a beloved elder than opeartionally in control of
the political party he had started; it seems to me that zuma took the hopes of mandela alumni backwards but there is a lot
of complexity- had south africa ever debated what the advantages/disavantages of its location to the globe/humanity were in
the 21st century- in many ways totally different to when all euro to asia shipping circumnavigated africa to this day africans
like ghana's president co-chair of the sdg advocates and new university laureate patrick awuah ashesi univerisity and opensociety
university networking coalition envision a collaboratory of new african universities where the lessos of south africa's virtually
free university are not forgottten:
university students were trusted to pay scholarship forward- if they went into money
making careers pay back to the university and be corporately resonsible as new leaders of industry; if they went back to the
community to be servant leaders, the university alumni club could test which local service solutions needed nationwide replication;
one of the extraordinary purposes of the new university was to work out missing curriculum of entrepreneurship and the informal
livelihood economy- which of these could be taught peer to peer with in the university- eg branso spent time passing on what
he knew thaT ALL SMALL ENTERPRISES NEEDED TO SHARE; ONCE THE COLLEGE STUDENTS UNDERSTOOD THE 13TH-15TH GRADE VERSION OF THESE-
HOW COULD THE CURRICULA BE SIMPLIFIED TO 7TH GRADE STILL the modal age that the nation's children leave schooling -what was
the shortlist of missing curricula - according to taddy 1 sme entreprenurship 2 coding e finacial literacy 4 mahaishi consciousness
- the latter mattered becuause he found that commencing college students often had as mesed up psychological profiles as gi's
returing from war; discovering confdence and love of self comes prior to studying what your place in the world can be
interestingly
whatever curricula free university students search out as missing are likly to be missing in older public servants - in other
words particularly in technolgy's fast changing world the new university can be imporant in offering training for leaders
of all ages- what american unis sometimes call businees exective training retreats is even more vital in renewd nations for
what we may call public servant executives - africa absolutely needs to celebrate this movement that started up out of south
africa even if today other africa nations pick up the relay- if you want to review world leaders in new univerities where
hi tech wizard students are expected to help with lifelong studies of public serrvants look to asia - singapore , korea are
places abed suggested benchmaking - the country most eager to value this future being china as far as research among the65%
of the world who are asians reveals
fazle abed's spent the fifth of hos 5 decades on poverty alleviation asking all
his best partners to consider how new uinversities needed to be the huan development bridge betwen ending povery and middle
income traps- his university - brac univeristy - is one of the cor coalition members of the ope sustainability university
networking:
cultural resolution and artostic celegrations of that are led by the soros backed bard college ny state,
berlin, palestin as well as the philosophical central euro university moved in is 31st year from soros homelang hungary to
vieena; vienna is where ban ki-moon with the former president of austria is developing the 2 most urgent missing curricula
of united ation acamics - global climate adaptability and local to global civic engagement of youth- ban ki moons post as
ethics director of the olympics gives him extrasordinary scope if post virus sports celbrties value chins are to transform
all livesmatter; ashesi uni is part of this coalition as is vice chancellor of arizona state whose major contribution to the
75th birthday of the united nations is to argue every way in which university 1.0 to 4.0 is destroying the possibilities of
students to be the first sustainability goals generation
calcutta in the bay of bangla was the main trading port and capital of all of india until the brit's found it safer
to admin the raj out of delhi- we know this because when james wilson founde of the economist was sent to india 1860 to start
banking that included indian people it was calcutta he went to start up chartered bank; sadly he died of diarrhea within 9
months of landing- it was ending diahhrea which was brac's first 200000 village womens knowhow network 12 decades later -
thanks to invention of oral rehydration-in nation building health for all can griw strong ecnomies not vice versa 
