Universities and Their Communities

I received an invitation to speak to the Heinz Endowments a few years ago. This major foundation was thinking of starting a program of charitable donations to help the environment and wanted advice about how to make the best use of its money. Would I participate, the director asked, in a one-day meeting on environmental education being organized by David Orr? My topic would be the role of the university. I went, and the following is more or less what I said to Heinz. During my first years as a board member of the Educational Foundation of America, which gives grants in a number of areas, including the environment and education, I was struck by the extreme scarcity of exciting, innovative, useful proposals coming out of the major research universities: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, and the like. The second-tier research universities are no better; they are all scrambling to copy the bad models ahead of them. The problems that the universities are doing little or nothing to address—either in teaching or in research—are those that we must confront if our civilization is to survive. They are materialism in our culture; the deterioration of human communities; anomie; the commercialization (privatization) of former communal functions such as health, charity, and communication; the growth imperative; exploitation of the Third World; the disintegration of agriculture; our ignorance of the ecology of disease, especially epidemic disease; the loss of important skills and knowledge; the devastating decline in the moral and cultural-intellectual education of children; the impoverishment and devaluation of language; and the turning away from environmental and human realities in favor of thin, life-sucking electronic substitutes. Far from confronting these problems, universities are increasingly allying themselves with the multinational commercial forces that are causing them. The institutions that are supposed to be generating the ideas that nourish and sustain society have abandoned this function in their quest for cash. It is typical, for example, that with all the academics working on developing and patenting new crops, the only effective mechanism for monitoring and preserving the priceless and rapidly dwindling stock of existing crops in North America and Europe—the heritage of agriculture—was developed by a young farmer completely outside the university system.