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Four Futures, Eight Ecosystems and a Feasible Utopia: a response to Chris Husbands

  • 8 October 2024

This HEPI blog was kindly authored by Ronald Barnett (www.ronaldbarnett.co.uk), Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at the Institute of Education and President of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society.

In a recent and influential HEPI report, Four futures: Shaping the future of higher education in England, Professor Sir Chris Husbands has set out four scenarios offering alternative paths for English institutions.  Those scenarios are portrayed as ‘ideal types’ of ‘possible futures’.  ‘None is intended to be a prediction’, all the scenarios being ‘deliberately provocative’.  However, Chris Husbands acknowledges that the scenarios have been drawn up without ‘any explicit reference to … societal shifts’. 

Against this background, I also offer four scenarios which are ‘ideal types’ of ‘possible futures’, where ‘none is intended to be a prediction’ and where I am being ‘deliberately provocative’.  However, the scenarios here differ from those of Chris Husbands in four crucial ways:

  1. The whole world: Whereas Chris Husbands is focused on English institutions of higher education, I have my sights on higher education right across the world. 
  2. Worldwide shifts: Whereas the HEPI report scenarios have, at their heart, the financing of higher education, those offered here adopt a much broader canvas.  Not only have they been drawn up sensitive to ‘societal shifts’ that Chris Husband has eschewed but they also take their bearings from worldwide shifts of global significance.
  3. Long timeframe: Whereas Chris Husband’s HEPI report has its value within contemporary policy framing, the challenges facing the world and higher education call for scenarios that are sensitive to the deep structures of the world and that have a long timeframe, both backwards and forwards.
  4. Ethical orientation: Whereas Chris Husband’s HEPI report is silent on ethics, the approach here is distinctly ethical.

I suggest that one way of identifying both the challenges faced by universities worldwide and ways forward lies in the idea of the ecological university.  The ecological university is not just entangled with multiple ecosystems but takes those entanglements very seriously. 

I suggest, too, that there are eight ecosystems that should especially occupy the attention of universities: knowledge, learning, individuals, culture, society (in its social institutions), the polity, the economy and Nature.  (While the economy is present in the list, it is no longer privileged but comes a long way down it.  Nature is last because is it largely the creature of the other seven ecosystems.)

Each of these eight ecosystems is impaired, impairments that are in part due to past actions of universities.  Universities, therefore, have responsibilities to do what they can to repair – or at least mitigate – the impairments in the ecosystems with which they are entangled.

However, each university has its own ecosystem profile.  Given its size, complexity, range of disciplines, history, resources and standing, each university stretches out across the eight ecosystems with its own pattern.  Its possibilities vary therefore and they will need to be imaginatively discerned.

Here are four scenarios in which universities can begin to face up to their ecosystem responsibilities:

  • A total response:  Here, a university would become fully an ecological university as a total institutional mission.  All of its teaching, research, scholarly, outreach, service and partnership activities would be galvanized and orchestrated to identify imaginative ways in which it might address its responsibilities across all eight ecosystems.  Its internal systems, its planning, and its committee structures would be oriented in that way and, publicly, it would unashamedly project itself as an ecological university. 
  • Selective across ecosystems:  Here, a university would identify just some of the eight ecosystems in which it would devote its efforts, say knowledge, learning, society and Nature.  With regard to knowledge, it would look to minimise knowledge injustices (whether related to gender, ethnicity, coloniality, or discipline).  With regard to learning, it would play its part in reconceiving what it is to learn in a world dominated by narrowing frameworks.  With regard to society, it would look widely to advance knowledge and understanding, its scholars becoming public intellectuals.  With regard to Nature, it would interpret sustainability radically, since the world’s systems have first to be reconstituted before being sustained.
  • Selective across mission:  Here, a university would choose to put its ecological eggs in one of its mission baskets, whether teaching, or research, or outreach, or lifelong learning, or partnership arrangements.  Wherever it chose to concentrate its ecological efforts, all eight ecosystems would come into play.
  • Selective across disciplines:  Here, a university would choose certain disciplines – or groups of disciplines (say, as they are clustered in faculties) – where it would focus its ecological efforts. 

It is evident that, since the ecosystems in question are entangled with each other and since the parts of a university are seldom discrete, any selective approach towards being an ecological university is going to run into difficulties.  But for tactical and resource reasons, a selective approach may make pragmatic sense as a starting option.

I intimated earlier that the ecological university is an ethical venture.  There is no one ethical approach that compels itself but rather a bevy of concepts provides an ethical hinterland.  They include justice, care, concern, fairness and otherness in addition to the ethical dimensions of education, learning, criticality, and truthfulness.  The ecological university is an ethical university but it has tasks in identifying the pool of values through which it advances its ecological credentials.

It may be said that the idea of the ecological university is utopian but it is entirely feasible: it is a feasible utopia.  Nevertheless, there is no blue-print here.  Each university has to sort out its ecological mission for itself.  There are large responsibilities and choices here in front of every would-be ecological university in the world.

Ronald Barnett is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education, University College London, and is the President of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society.  His latest book, just published, is Realizing the Ecological University: Eight Ecosystems, Their Antagonisms and a Manifesto (Bloomsbury).  https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/realizing-the-ecological-university-9781350450868/

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2 comments

  1. Matt says:

    An interesting read, but I take issue with the notion that ‘Nature is last because is it largely the creature of the other seven ecosystems.’

    To the contrary, it could be argued nature should come first, because all other ecosystems stem from it. Our understanding of how our natural world, the resources it provides, and the spaces we occupy, underpin our wealth, health, wellbeing, social interactions, culture, ability to learn, etc, is only growing.

  2. Thanks, Matt.

    Deliberately (as I set out in my book published a fortnight ago), I place Nature last in the series for two reasons:
    – partly as a very conscious rebuttal to the idea that it should come first, and
    – partly because Nature is no longer natural but because it has become impaired (as it is) largely through the effects of the other seven ecosystems (that I pick out) and which act upon it.

    As I put it, Nature is first among equals across the eight ecosystems that I pick out but we can properly understand it and address it only if we get to it by going through the other seven ecosystems and understanding their effects on it.

    Placing Nature last in the series is actually to do it proper justice in acknowledging its (ontological) complexity.

    Cheers
    Ron

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