The Ecological University

A Feasible Utopia

Ronald Barnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351762410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Universities continue to expand, bringing considerable debate about their purposes and relationship to the world. In The Ecological University, Ronald Barnett argues that universities are short of their potential and responsibilities in an ever-changing and challenging environment.

This book centres on the idea that the expansion of higher education has opened new spaces and possibilities. The university is interconnected with a number of ecosystems: knowledge, social institutions, persons, the economy, learning, culture and the natural environment. These seven ecosystems of the university are all fragile and in order to advance and develop them universities need to engage with each one.

By looking at matters such as the challenges of learning, professional life and research and inquiry, this book outlines just what it could mean for higher education institutions to understand and realize themselves as exemplars of the ecological university. With bold and original insights and practical principles for development, this radical and transformative book is essential reading for university leaders and administrators, academics, students, and all interested in the future of the university.

PART I
The idea of the ecological

1
THE IDEA OF ECOLOGY

Introduction

The idea of ecology points to the interconnectedness of all things in the world (and even beyond). It gains its power from a sense of impairment, especially a sense that systems – ecosystems – have been corrupted in some way: their inner diversity has been weakened or some other misfortune has befallen them. It also contains an inner commentary that humanity bears some responsibility for such disturbances and an urging that humanity has a responsibility to help in restoring the integrity of its environment. These five dimensions of ecology – interconnectedness, potential diversity, impairment, responsibility and restoration – are testimony to the idea of ecology being (in the language of Bernard Williams [2008/1995]) a thick concept, containing several components. ‘Ecology’ is fact and values together. But more, it looks to the past, present and future. It is critical but also hopeful. It is visionary, having a sense of unfulfilled potential, yet to be fully realized. It leaps out from our present condition, and holds up a sense of a better world that can at least be striven for.¹

And so it is, too, for the university. The university lives among its worldly ecosystems which are not as they might be. Of course, the university cannot be held solely responsible for any impairment that its associated ecosystems might exhibit, but it is implicated in any such impairment, even if just through any disinclination to act where it could so intervene. The university is not merely interconnected with the world but its work has influence in the world. To use a modish word of our time, the university has ‘impact’ in and on the world. And so the components of ecology already discerned – interconnectedness, diversity, impairment, responsibility and restoration – emerge as components of the university of the twenty-first century and its total ecosphere. The university cannot stand idly by: it now has responsibilities in furthering the wellbeing of the many ecologies with which it intersects.

The university is an active variable in the ecological character of the world. This is a universal feature of the modern university – and yet this presence, with its universality, has rarely been recognized. There is something of an ecological void attendant on the university.

These assertions will, of course, have to be fleshed out in what follows. But they already indicate much of the roughness of the terrain ahead.² Matters abound as to what might be meant by ecology, ecosystems, universities being implicated in ecosystems, diversity, impairment, responsibility and restoration. And there is dispute over each matter. For example, in relation to the knowledge ecology, is diversity across disciplines more – or less – important than a diversity of frameworks within a discipline? The ground, therefore, is uneven. It is a terrain, however, that must be trod, for nothing less than the intersecting futures of the world and the university are at stake. The world is not as it could be. Its ecosystems are impaired and the university, too, is falling short of its potential in the world. These two situations are not coincidental, for the university has yet fully to acknowledge its worldly character and its possibilities in and responsibilities towards the world.

Terminology

‘Ecology’ is a double-barrelled term. It both refers to systems in themselves that have an internal unity, the coherence of which could be threatened in some way, and also refers to a study of such systems in the world. An ecology is both out there, as a real presence in the world, and is a form of thought, understanding and knowledge generated by humanity. (It is at once an ontological and an epistemological term.) This dual-headedness applies also to the university, for the university lives amid ecologies (they have real substance in the world) and also has helped to bequeath the formation of ecology as an academic field of study. To aid discussion, for the most part, I shall use the term ‘ecosystem’ to refer to systems in which the university is implicated, and I shall reserve the term ‘ecology’ to understandings of such systems.

The ecologists refer to the idea of deep ecology, although its definition varies. Here, what is important in the idea is that ecology is not merely beyond humanity, but rather that humanity is deeply implicated in ecology. The idea that ecology is simply ‘out there’, something to which humanity might or might not respond (even if it feels some pang of responsibility in the matter), is redolent of instrumental reason. And it was in part through the dominance of instrumental reason that the world has taken on its present character and is now faced with an ecological crisis. This point is cardinal to our present purposes. For the situation that lies before us is not just one of an ecological crisis in front of and outside the university, to which it may or may not respond. Rather, the university is already implicated ecologically. Ecological dimensions are already deep within the university.

Opening here is nothing less than an ecological study of the university or, rather, to be more precise, an eco-philosophy of the university – or even, to use a term of Félix Guattari (2005/1989), an ‘ecosophy’ of the university. To my knowledge, this has not so far been attempted and perhaps for good reason. The terrain before us widens and opens pathways going in multiple directions. To adapt a phrase, there are less ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2007/1980) than there are paths of possible journeying – and even blockages – aplenty before us.

Two features of the situation before us stand out at this early stage. First, the university is intertwined not with a single ecology; and nor, therefore, is there a single ecological crisis in front of the university. Rather, the university is intertwined in multiple ecologies or, as I wish to term them, multiple ecosystems. These ecosystems have already been intimated but we may list them again now, before coming onto them more fully in what follows. They are seven in number, being the ecosystems of:

1 knowledge

2 social institutions

3 persons

4 the economy

5 learning

6 culture

7 the natural environment.

Simply to list these ecosystems is to indicate that to speak of the ecological university is to invoke much more than the ecosystems of the natural world. Moreover, to speak of the ecological world is to imply an interconnectedness of the university with the whole world, in all of its epistemological, symbolic, social and psychological aspects. And it is – through the term ‘ecological’ – to suggest that the university should have a care for all of these ecosystems. This care now becomes a responsibility that the university cannot evade, except by putting itself at peril and those ecosystems too.

To put it mildly, this is a situation of some complexity. Not only is the university intermeshing with the seven ecosystems, but those ecosystems are interacting with each other. The knowledge ecosystem affects the economic ecosystem which affects the social ecosystem which in turn affects the psychological ecosystems of individual persons.³ But there is also – as it may be said – supercomplexity present too (Barnett, 2000). For each ecosystem, not to mention the university’s intermeshings with it, poses conceptual problems. Is ‘sustainability’ a helpful or inadequate concept here? To what extent can humanity – and thereto universities – be said to have ‘responsibilities’ in addressing any shortcomings that an ecosystem might exhibit? If the very concept of responsibility can hold sway here, what might be a proper balance between the social and the personal levels? And just why should the concept of ecology claim the high ground, even if broadly interpreted, in deriving an idea of the university for the twenty-first century and even beyond? These are super complex questions in that responses to them could never be susceptible to a consensus, and yet they are significant questions, gnawing at what it is to be a university in the twenty-first century.

To put the concepts of university and ecological together, then – as in ‘the ecological university’ – is not only to point to the university being oriented in several directions, but it is also to point to the university acting with intent on different levels, having regard to persons and institutions, to the private and public spheres, and to the local and the universal domains.

Second, the idea of the ecological university has a real aspect. It speaks to systems that stand in the world separately from and independently of the university, even if the university has powers to have an impact on those systems. The idea of the ecological university is a hybrid concept, with one foot in the realm of the ‘real’, and one foot in the realm of ideas; and the two realms play against each other. Its real ontological character keeps one foot on the ground, even if it harbours tendencies to soar into the starry firmament of ideas.

For example, the idea of academic freedom may reasonably be part of the conceptual filling out of the ecological university and opens to a multitude of interpretations, but it would also take a bearing from the way in which academic freedom is playing out in the twenty-first century, not least in the ways in which academics are being imprisoned by some governments and so denied the space to fulfil their academic responsibilities. But work on that topic would also take note of the surreptitious ways in which more democratic states subtly steer academic life – through sanctions only marginally less intimidating than incarceration – to pursue this kind of research, to generate income, to attend to students in a particular way, to leave behind old-fashioned thoughts about academic collegiality, and doggedly to follow bureaucratic protocols. Ideas of academic freedom – however abstract they may be – need, if they are to be appropriate to their age, to be rooted in the relevant aspects of the world.

Always on the move

To speak of the ecological is to imply a world of movement and change. Ecosystems are never static and so it is with the ecosystems of the university. They are turbulent pools and, like the canoeist in the slalom competition, the university has to find ways of working in that motion so as to maintain some kind of course.

Following the work of the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (in their extra-ordinary book, A Thousand Plateaus, 2007/1980),⁴ many like to speak of rhizomatic settings, the metaphor alluding to a directionless entanglement of growing and spreading matter characteristic of rhizomes. There is much in the metaphor but it is far too static. Metaphors of fluidity and liquidity are more to the point here. The university is much more like a squid moving in the multiple currents of the ocean. The university has a shell – it exists as a real phenomenon in the world, with physical, legal, financial and institutional properties – but it has long tentacles that can reach out, and even into small crevices. And it has to keep on the move amid waters that are never quiescent. On occasions, it can even move quite fast.

Time, space, movement and geography all play out here amid these ‘global fluids’ (Urry, 2003: 60). The ecosystems of the university draw the university in, each university having its own time–space signature. Some of those ecosystems – such as those of the economy, knowledge and even learning – are more digitized than others, and so present with added freneticism. Some – again such as knowledge, the economy and learning – are more global than others. And some – such as social institutions, persons and culture – are more characterized by expressive as against material components (DeLanda, 2013/2006). In these latter ecosystems, language, meaning and intersubjective understandings remain stubbornly important.

As a result, the university finds itself moving in ecosystems that have their own pace and rhythm.⁵ The financial systems of the world have become part of a global algorithmic machine that works at the speed of light, whereas culture characteristically still moves at a slower pace. Universities, for all their high-powered computerized resources, struggle to keep fully in touch with a cybernetic world (Peters, 2015). But they also opt to develop their physical grounds as public art galleries in which members of the public are expected to move at a slow pace (Hards, Vaughan and Williams, 2014), and they employ resident artists and quartets (with their own time–space signatures).

Another set of concepts deployed by Deleuze and Guattari (in that same work) are those of territorialization and de-territorialization. These concepts go further than matters of geography and speak to the matter of integrity, with ‘territorialization’ referring to a process in which an entity secures a greater integrity and ‘de-territorialization’ to a loss of such integrity. We see these processes in university internationalization. Establishing branches in other countries, perhaps even on the other side of the world, can self-evidently bring in its wake processes of deterritorialization. This is less a matter of geographical dispersal but is more a matter of pedagogical integrity, as the university is presented with students’ varying ‘cultural scripts’ (Welikala and Watkins, 2008) in its different locations across the world. Perhaps – pace Wittgenstein (1978/1953) – we should rather talk of a ‘family’ of student experiences within such a university, there being no unifying essence that runs across it.

Significant in this example of internationalization is that six of our seven ecosystems – knowledge, social institutions, persons, learning, culture and the natural environment – are immediately implicated here, while the remaining one – the economy considered as an ecology – also plays its part. And in being acti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The coming of the ecological university
• Part I The idea of the ecological
• Part II The ecological university
• Part III Ecological audit
• Bibliography
• Subject index
• Name index