The following is a piece I recently wrote to a group of colleagues at liberal arts college in the East. They had been lamenting the various crises in higher education in recent years. I proffered the idea that there is really just one fundamental crisis, rooted in our culture of consumption. Here is the text of that piece, with very little editing for this blog.
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Overall, I fear that traditional 20th century-type large-scale, centralized, "brick-and-mortar" education is going the same way as large-scale hospital care, airline transportation, automobile manufacturing, and agricultural production. The costs associated with the various matter-energy inputs needed to sustain these institutions / industries are continuously rising, over the long-term, due to increasing scarcities in global commodities markets.
This is especially true for oil, and the energy intensive processes associated with the fabrication of most industrial and consumer inputs needed to sustain such organizations. In other words, large universities--just like many other large-scale industries--have been getting gradually more and more expensive to operate, over time.
Add to the above matter-energy scenario the human-induced imposition of neoliberal economic thought (and the "logic of econometric efficiency" in tandem with that of "externalities"), wherein many of these cost increases were passed on to students (via increased tuitions) and faculty/staff (via stagnant/declining outlays to support real wages, and benefits) over the past 2-3 decades, and this turns out to be a "deadly cocktail" for much of modern education, as we've known it.
Sadly, far too many of us have focused on immediate "symptoms," rather than the underlying "disease" which has caused this long-term predicament. The made-for-TV-style "Dichotomies of Distraction" abound, of course: labor v. management; liberal v. conservative; democrat v. republican; poor v. rich, "People of Color" v. "White Folks," everybody v. the Americans, etc., etc.
Q: What's been exacerbating the discourse that seemingly swirls around these issues with increasing velocity?
Hint: the frequently missing element in our social analyses has been quietly churning underneath our feet, all along.
The natural resource base of the Earth is now starting to wear very thin in some places, my friends. And no amount of finger pointing, or ill will, or bemoaning our apparent oppression at the hands of "The Man" will reverse this process of long-term resource decline. Only direct, targeted, collective and sustained action will begin to address the predicament we are now facing. Failure to do so--and do so "effectively"--will only continue to bring Nature's wrath down upon us with increasing ferocity. And, FYI, she usually prefers "collective" punishment (no suburbs, gated communities, "Ecotopias," or "strictly organic" farms to which we might run! The sky covers all of us!) To paraphrase the social and environmental justice activist, Van Jones: We are living through the tale-end of what we will come to remember as "The Good Old Days," unless we address these underlying environmental and natural resource concerns.
The economic decline / collapse of the concept of "The University as we've known it" is a tragedy, to be sure. However, that particular tragedy is now inextricably linked with a host of others. And those are, in turn, driven by what's been happening in the sky, in the Earth, in the water, and in our bodies. The moral of this story: if we want to do something to save what has been good in the University for future generations, then we must also do something to save what has been good in the physical environment as a whole (in the Earth), which has so effectively supported that same University. That means, in simple terms, fundamentally reorganizing how we extract, store, deploy, and consume matter-energy resources.
This, I believe, is the highest of callings, and one of the most fundamentally "Revolutionary" acts to which we could now apply ourselves.
Blaine
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