Abstract
Chet Bowers gets a pass; he has earned it. After writing 18 books about higher education’s role and responsibility to advance social justice, ecological equity, and sustainability’s moral imperative, he has received a vote of support from the marketplace of ideas—and book buyers. Bowers’ voicing of critical and perhaps unpopular perspectives regarding higher education’s various failures has a support base and legitimacy we must respect. Indeed, noted campus leaders have applauded many of the ideas in his new book, University Reform in an Era of Global Warming. Yet this latest book is a bit of an opportunity lost—or at least deferred—as he fails to consolidate his narrative into the change paradigm he calls for.
Bowers does articulate a solid analysis of higher education’s failings, including disturbing realisations about higher education’s systematic disenfranchisement of diverse cultural moralities and narratives—a failing that undercuts its ability to arm the next generation with tools sufficient to flourish, perhaps even survive, in the era of climate disruption we are now entering. Bowers rightly invokes the urgency of climate change as an imperative to which higher education must respond. The reforms he outlines would fundamentally change what people learn about and how they respond to climate change. The stakes are just as high as he indicates. His prose reads like a movie script, and clearly, the fate of humanity is at risk if we do not take immediate and meaningful action.
Bowers begins by contextualising his perspective as grounded in the need to eliminate eco-racism, diminish the supremacy of the North in the developing world, revitalise intergenerational knowledge transfer through the cultural commons of our ancient traditions and cultures, foster the pursuit of sustainable lifestyles, and command a respect for all Earth’s creatures as essential to all life. Fair enough. No arguments.
The book then expands on these themes, identifies barriers to their amelioration, and calls for the reforms needed to address them. The identified problems range from relatively focused, such as how to embed sustainability issues throughout the curriculum, to the staggering challenge of how to reverse the current knowledge ethos that what is good for business is good for society.
Even more challenging, Bowers points to campuses’ technocentrism as fathering the ‘new technologies and globalising the western systems of production and consumer-dependant lifestyle. The effect of these activities has now reached, to use the metaphor introduced by climate scientists [many of whom work in higher education], the tipping point’.
Yet Bowers’ call to action lacks a fundamental element—an action plan. Bowers fails to meet the urgency of the challenge he correctly casts for higher education. Although he identifies problems, his plan for reform includes only plaintive cries that faculty ‘should’ do this and administrators ‘must’ do that. Missing from his recipe for reform is the critical ‘how’.
To wit
In order to address this crisis, faculty in all of the academic disciplines as well as the professional schools will need to examine the cultural assumptions that were taken for granted during their own years of graduate study when there was less awareness of environmental limits.
Okay, nice idea but it would be helpful to know just how to start all faculty towards any common goal—and to identify for them the issues of which they are apparently not aware.
Campus leaders are a conservative lot, and the academy’s momentum is ponderous. Turning that ship of state will require enormous rudder advantage for even a few degrees of change. Bowers makes a compelling case that we may need a full 180-degree change in direction. Thus, conservative campus leaders must be given a chart they can all follow—and be inspired to do so. Bowers’ book will inspire those already trying to steer a sustainable course, but is unlikely to recruit the new leverage needed for a full course correction.
This is where Bowers gets a pass. No doubt, Bowers will write another book or two. No doubt, few authors have the in-depth understanding of higher education of Chet Bowers. What we know about campus leaders is that most are too busy in the engine room to spend much time on the bridge. Thus change agents must overlay their desired changes onto the ongoing problems of the day. If campus leaders see that they can address multiple issues with one tool, they may be more prone to do so.
So, what are the existing perceived front-burner problems that campus leaders grapple with every day? They include issues of diversity, access and affordability, graduation rates, intellectual rigour, political elitism, technocentrism that threatens to erode the value or even the existence of a liberal arts education, as well as a preoccupation with athletics that routinely diverts assets and reputations into the hopper of the athletic scandal du jour. Now, we add climate change and sustainability to the agenda of college administrators—and wonder why we don’t get a lot of call backs.
Bowers piles on top of the front-burner issues his legitimate if ethereal problems. It is, therefore, predictable that his work will be dismissed by campus administrators as high-minded, unrealistic and too-big-to-fix. That would be an opportunity lost.
Instead, Bowers could easily map his diagnosis and calls for reform to the ongoing issues campus administrators face—and suggest that addressing his agenda ministers to theirs. For instance, the issue of revitalising the narrative around the reconstruction of the cultural commons could easily map to ongoing campus efforts to improve diversity and access. Likewise, overcoming the double bind that equates economic—and campus—growth with necessary progress while undercutting the natural support that sustains us might be seen as freeing for administrators who fear the next big donor who demands a new campus edifice built in his or her image.
Looking at Bowers prodigious book list and 40-year career in higher education, it is comforting to know that he cares deeply about where education is going—and where it should be. It is comforting to know that few have his insight and understanding of the entrenched systems that power the educational engines. And it is comforting to contemplate and look forward to his next work that might focus on crafting a practical, studied plan by which campus change agents can alter higher education and thus the course of humanity.
God knows, it needs to be changed.