All of the advertising space in the Union Square subway concourse has been filled with New School swag this week. Come join the cool kids at the Festival of New! Many of the people invited to its assorted conversations are names unknown to me - new, I guess! But two discussions I attended today had me thinking in a new way about 1919 and why one might have thought that universities weren't up to the task of preparing us for an increasingly complex and dynamic world...
In one, dedicated to new thinking on climate resilience, a speaker and his host, both of whom encourage people to envision futures 50 or 60 years from now as part of urban planning, disagreed over whether human beings were hard-wired for short-term thinking. The speaker thought not: while the amygdala forces short-term thinking, the prefrontal lobes are designed to help us think long term, as ancient societies show. Short-term concerns have to be addressed before people can really settle into longer-term visioning, but it can be done. (Meditation can help too, apparently!) Our culture, however, trains us to be short-term thinkers in every way - a culture we need to change if we are to develop the "ethics of the anthropocene" we urgently need.
I got to thinking about what a school could to encourage longer-term thinking, and whether our school does it. We talk a lot about wicked problems, challenging the status quo, being unafraid of the new. But our curriculum's determinedly presentist. Can people envision a more than immediate future if they never learn about the past?The other panel was about decolonizing the university, and also touched on the anthropocene. One speaker recalled alum Roy Scranton's argument that we need to learn to let our (western) civilization die before it destroys all possibility of life on this planet, and went on to argue that universities, as producers of colonialist knowledge and validators of colonialist structures and institutions may need to go, too. It's not enough to bring indigenous knowledges, epistemologies and scholars into the university; as long as they are just a supplement to a settler colonial institution the institution is unchanged, or even made more dangerous. Referring to the Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca, he imagined new institutions serving the needs of indigenous people and the ecological lifeworlds they alone understand how to sustain (a kind of long term thinking!). The authority we enjoy as credentialed university professors? We may need to give it away.
This too got me thinking of 1919. The founders' criticisms of universities as reactionary, dangerously committed to old ways of knowing and thinking, aren't as radical as these critiques (though they too had seen a civilization collapsing in WW1). But to the extent that they abandoned university careers to throw in their lot with a fledging "school" which disdained disciplines and degrees and an education built around inheritances, they too gave away the prestige of being part of an institution which didn't realize it was bankrupt and complicit. We're a university ourselves now, of course... Much to ponder!
In other news, the US president shot someone on Fifth Avenue today.
