Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

“The University’s Crisis of Purpose”

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Harvard University President, Drew Gilpin Faust, argues in the NY Times that higher education, in order to deal with global challenges like climate warming, needs to return to its liberal arts principles rather than producing countless numbers of business majors.

Some excerpts:

The world economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama will change the future of higher education. Even as universities, both public and private, face unanticipated financial constraints, the president has called on them to assist in solving problems from health care delivery to climate change to economic recovery….

As the world indulged in a bubble of false prosperity and excessive materialism, should universities — in their research, teaching and writing — have made greater efforts to expose the patterns of risk and denial? Should universities have presented a firmer counterweight to economic irresponsibility? Have universities become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve? Has the market model become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education?

As a nation, we need to ask more than this from our universities. Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. Human beings need meaning, understanding and perspective as well as jobs. The question should not be whether we can afford to believe in such purposes in these times, but whether we can afford not to.

Others have argued similarly in the Times recently (Is it Time to Retrain B-Schools? and End the University as We Know It.)

Are these isolated rumblings, or is there a more fundamental problem, first identified by Wendell Berry and David Orr years ago, that the way we train students and structure higher education contributes to the major environmental and social problems we now face?

What does it mean to train students to be successful in a world that is ecologically unsustainable and socially unjust?

Tags: Harvard, higher education
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