And this rootlessness applies not just to would-be professors, but to students as well. As Ink points out in his post, drawing on the work of Wes Jackson, universities are training students for "upward mobility" rather than "homecoming." Jackson argues, I believe correctly, that a major aspect of living sustainability is experiencing a place intimately for a long period of time. The student of "homecoming" learns to observe the ecological interrelationships of a particular locale, to work within its natural rhythms, to build up a permanent culture that fits it. The question is, how does academia go from merely analyzing the rootedness and ecological know-how of "traditional" and "indigenous" societies to transforming our own? Can environmentally conscious academics ever practice what they preach?
I am not sure these contradictions in academia can ever be resolved, at least not without compromising its historic role in civilization. Granted, universities are leading the way in "going green" and "going local"--often in response to pressure from students. It is now not uncommon to observe campuses taking on strict green building standards and procurement policies, buying local and organic foods, promoting mass transit, and starting interdisciplinary programs in local and regional "sustainability." A few of the more enlightened universities are even including students in the building process and campus gardens. But these efforts, though necessary in the larger movement toward "homecoming," are also limited.
And rightly so. The fact is, academia has always drawn its strength from its placelessness, its tendency to abstraction, and the itineracy of its membership. We as a society would be worse off if we insist that academia "go local" through and through. To be clear, it is important to distinguish between the university as a physical site, as the body of faculty who happen to occupy it, and as a global community committed to the free exchange of ideas.
Let me elaborate on my argument by way of some historical context-building. Back in the twelfth century, the Augustinian mystic Hugh of St. Victor wrote to his students:
The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native is one already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is a foreign land.On the surface at least, Hugh's praise for detachment from one's "native soil" would seem to directly contradict Wes Jackson's more recent--and seemingly more relevant--call for students to experience "homecoming." One could easily read into Hugh's advice a dangerous precedent in Western attitudes to the environment that we are better off without. But I think this sort of interpretation isn't warranted, nor is it particularly useful. Detachment is a core value of scholarly pursuit that is largely responsible for many of our greatest advances in the social and natural sciences. At its best, academia is a community of critics whose final loyalty is to the truth, not to any particular religion, nation, culture, or, for that matter, bioregion. A good scholar, as Hugh understood, has to pursue the impossible goal of living as a citizen of both everywhere and nowhere. To take just a few of the finest examples of this ideal, one thinks of Socrates, Ibn Khaldun, and Alexander von Humboldt.
Then again, the lifestyle of even the most itinerant scholars and the most cosmopolitan campuses of just a couple centuries ago would be held up today as an (unattainable) paragon of "green living." Ibn Khaldun, for example, wasn't tugged by guilt about his carbon footprint as he embarked on one of his many sailboat trips; nor did Hugh and his colleagues at St. Victor in Paris feel the need to enact an abbey-wide policy of purchasing as much food as possible from within the Seine watershed.
However, we are living with a worldview that would have been unimaginable to the likes of Hugh of St. Victor and his contemporaries. They didn't have to reflect on environmental and resource use issues as a matter of intellectual honesty, as we do. Somewhat paradoxically, much of the planetary "eco-consciousness" informing the localization movement was the result of extensive travel and exchange. And even if many of the best scientists and scholars didn't literally live on the move, they spent much of their mental lives far afield, through books, correspondence, and conversation with visitors. Knowledge has grown rapidly thanks to international self-policing groups of peers (though how that knowledge gets assembled into culturally useful "guidelines" is another matter, of which more below).
Over the past few centuries, discoveries in astronomy, biology, geology, and ecology have increasingly de-centered humans, and human morality, from the drama of the universe. They have rendered untenable a literal interpretation of the sacred texts simply assumed until relatively recently to be true. Along with this has gone the assumption that the Earth will always be a comfortable abode for humankind. Science has increasingly displaced theology, which is just as well given the pace and intensity of our impact on the environment since the beginning of industrialization. We, as a society, now need to understand the whys and wherefores of our material existence in a way that would have been utterly foreign just a century ago.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that we in the overdeveloped world need to live more closely within our local resource endowments to have any hope of a decent future. But many disciplines keep right on teaching, often tacitly, as if industrialization and globalization are going to continue indefinitely. In this respect, Wes Jackson is right to point out that the main degree issued by universities these days is "upward mobility" in a competitive, highly mobile society. On the other hand, the world has become much more "complex" and "information-rich," so on some level, having strong, well-supported academic disciplines around is a good idea. Besides, who is to decide which disciplines are part of the problem and which are part of the solution? Each can make claims of their value. In any case, the issue, as I see it, is not disciplinary boundaries per se.
My thinking at this point is that academia would be best served in its efforts at "going green" and "going local" by paying attention to scale just as much as its members pay attention to creating new programs and majors. I've made arguments before about the importance of scale for moving toward a future of ecologically benign abundance, and it applies to our overgrown universities as well. Downscaling universities addresses two issues at once: what goes on among the people within it and how it relates to the outside world around it.
Though what a university does, green-wise, on its own campus as an example to the rest of society is important, what is more important is its traditional role as a center for universal knowledge. To this end, it establishes close physical contact among its disciplines so that each may benefit by its constant awareness of what is going on in all the others. Here I'll quote Leopold Kohr at length from his article, "Architecture for Education":
This is a relatively simple matter as long as a university is small. But once it begins to outgrow certain physical limits the contacts between disciplines become increasingly difficult to maintain. At a given point of expansion the individual faculty member will be functionally isolated by the widening ring of colleagues appointed to teach the same subject. Since the human capacity for association limits fruitful contacts with different persons to perhaps eight or ten a day, any specialized department of more than ten necessarily tends to impede extra-departmental contacts. This trend becomes irreversible if expansion assumes such proportions that specialized departments require their own buildings, thereby adding physical isolation to functional isolation.At this stage, universalists are by necessity turned into specialists. Disciplines, brought together to meet, are organized into exclusive cartels, forced by the scale of their new environment to stay apart. Their paths, like super highways, no longer intersect, increasing the efficiency of coordinated movement, but destroying the very basis of academic productivity. For academic inspiration is the result not of efficient teamwork but of individual effort, not of concerted movements proceeding without obstruction in the same direction, but of an arrangement ensuring a high incidence of unplanned head-on collisions. Like the inspiration of the poet, it derives its spark not from organized contacts such as faculty seminars, all-university conferences and joint lunches, but from spontaneous chance encounters. And to be effective, these encounters must not only be spontaneous but frequent.... But both the spontaneity and frequency of interdisciplinary contacts are destroyed when a university expands beyond certain physical limits.
Kohr believes, and I agree, that the answer to this dilemma rests in the physical contraction of the size of the faculty and student body. He looks to the medieval quadrangle of the old universities, which by its very architecture limited the size of the student body to little more than 1,000 or 1,500. The size of the faculty would be likewise constrained. To Kohr, the medieval quadrangle "makes it impossible for likes to associate only with likes, thereby averting specialization by the sheer requirements of companionship."
Whatever actual shape they take, small universities present other advantages. One aspect of "going local" that academics and students should take to heart is the importance of casual, frequent, open-ended, unplanned meetings with others. There is no better way to test the greater value of your line of study than to have to explain it, in clear language, to a reasonably informed outsider. (This would especially be the case with a hiring committee...) There would be, in other words, a tighter reciprocity between the production of original research and its transferability to the public sphere in the form of "useful knowledge." And just as small, compact university campuses promote fertile academic interchange, they are also much easier to integrate into the urban fabric than the sprawling mega-campuses typical in our landscape today. This basic physical effect, in addition to the weakening of "departmental cartels" due to downscaling, could open up the "gray area" between the university and the public sphere. One beneficial outcome could be more place-specific knowledge, without the deadening specialist jargon common today in many branches of the sciences and humanities. Finally, a multiplicity of small universities dotted more evenly around the country would make it much easier for both faculty and students to choose where they want to settle--either as far from or near to their homeland as they wanted. This sort of arrangement could facilitate "homecoming" without necessarily compromising the universalist, cosmopolitan mission of academia.
I'm not arguing that downscaling our universities would guarantee a greener future. But insofar as localization is a necessary part of that greener future, it is more likely to be a useful byproduct than the tacking-on of "sustainability" programs to our preexisting academic structures. The other pertinent fact--if you believe anything I have written previously--is that public funding for higher education is probably on a permanent downward trajectory. Smaller universities are actually cheaper, because they are able to save the most wasteful of all costs: maintaining an administrative apparatus. The ability to resolve problems and coordinate action without resort to hierarchical, clear-cut lines of authority is naturally limited to a small number of people. Academics, smart as they think they are, have to live within these limits as well. It is notable that some of our best ideas came, free-of-charge, from the pens of thinkers who did little more than discuss and harangue in the pub or cafe. I'm not making the case that we should revert entirely to amateur scholarship, which would be particularly disastrous in research-heavy fields of inquiry. But the high cost of keeping large bodies of faculty in some semblance of coordination is often accepted as a given, when in many cases it doesn't have to be.
I haven't discussed certain issues such as academic autonomy in a highly localized setting, nor have I fully addressed the possible objection that the quality of scholarship would decline as a result of university downscaling. But perhaps those are topics for another post.
