{"id":9656,"date":"2018-05-23T07:54:58","date_gmt":"2018-05-23T12:54:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=9656"},"modified":"2021-06-10T09:45:17","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T14:45:17","slug":"whats-the-big-deal-or-whither-universities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2018\/05\/23\/whats-the-big-deal-or-whither-universities\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s the big deal? Or, whither universities…"},"content":{"rendered":"

A post-Commencement pep talk for myself (& academic friends who care to listen)<\/em><\/p>\n

It should be pretty obvious by now that predatory<\/a>, extractive<\/a> capitalism is not working, and that we need to move swiftly to a regenerative<\/a> mixed economy grounded in a respect for living systems.<\/p>\n

The implications of that are pretty simple, but also profound.<\/p>\n

For instance, that transition will require phasing out all of the millions of jobs<\/a>\u00a0— predatory jobs, bullshit jobs<\/a> — that are premised on squeezing a profit at the expense of people, communities, and living systems. And it will require a simultaneous phasing in of all the work that it takes to make our communities socially and ecologically sustainable — healthy, happy, just, flourishing, eudaimonic,<\/a>\u00a0and ecologically diverse and resilient.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are a lot of the first kind of jobs around (but hardly enough for everyone to benefit from them — because the current economic system isn’t intended to do that). And there is a lot of the second kind of work to be done. The only thing lacking is the skill of the transition.<\/p>\n

That’s where higher education should come in.<\/p>\n

Universities and community colleges are the most widely spread institutions that are in a position to train young adults to figure out what needs to be done and how to do it. They are the only institutions that draw in young people from all around, work with them for a handful of years, and then send them out again. And they are among the only institutions with a geographical distribution so wide and pervasive that would enable them to interact with communities everywhere on issues of collective concern and urgency. (That they don’t do that, for the most part, is a historical contingency that need not determine their fate. There’s something to be said about land-grant<\/a> universities like mine, though there’s much more that\u00a0could be done<\/a> with that legacy.)<\/p>\n

“Training” young people for “what needs to be done” need not be thought of restrictively. “Training” can mean cultivating, enabling, inspiring, and facilitating their own self-<\/em>training.<\/p>\n

And “what needs to be done” is hardly all technical. We certainly need engineers and technicians to figure out how to put together the nuts and the bolts and manual laborers to handle them with dexterity. But we also need other kinds of laborers: cultural, artistic, dramaturgical, entrepreneurial, psychological, and philosophical workers who would learn from the historical repository of how humans have creatively met their challenges, and who would challenge themselves to come up with visions and strategies for doing that in today’s and tomorrow’s world. (To say that the humanities are central to that is an understatement.)<\/p>\n

Working for a university today, especially in the liberal arts, can often feel like working for an institution that is under siege. It needn’t feel that way. The ones who are steering that institution to blindly sail forward with the sinking ship of predatory capitalism are the ones who should be feeling under siege.<\/p>\n

The rest of us, if we have a creative bone in our bodies and an inkling of the world-historical situation we are in, are the ones who should be feeling empowered to act creatively and to re-steer our institutions in a new direction. Let’s just do it.<\/p>\n

#Movement-for-a-regenerative-university<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A caveat: Yes, I realize that words like “regenerative” and “resilient” are all too easily strung together into euphonic mantras promoting the vangardism of self-proclaimed “thought leaders,” whose impact beyond their own circles is limited and whose goals often don’t extend beyond the greenwashed veneer of their brand. I’m not wedded to these words. The point is to start where we are with whoever is there, uproot the assumptions that hold the status quo in place, and do the hard work of reinvention.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A post-Commencement pep talk for myself (& academic friends who care to listen) It should be pretty obvious by now that predatory, extractive capitalism is not working, and that we need to move swiftly to a regenerative mixed economy grounded in a respect for living systems. The implications of that are pretty simple, but also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[203,690660],"tags":[455179,348,455180,4420,16147,455181,402081,455185,455178,225,280,4433,455145,123560,455183,455182],"class_list":["post-9656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academe","category-cultural_politics","tag-bullshit-jobs","tag-capitalism","tag-david-graeber","tag-ecology","tag-environmental-studies","tag-eudaimonia","tag-higher-education","tag-movement-for-a-regenerative-university","tag-regenerative-economics","tag-resilience","tag-socialism","tag-sustainability","tag-sustainability-transition","tag-transition","tag-transition-culture","tag-universities"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-2vK","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":13004,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2022\/09\/28\/steal-this-book\/","url_meta":{"origin":9656,"position":0},"title":"Steal this book","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 28, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"Wiley's sudden withdrawal of over 1,300 textbooks from the ProQuest Academic Complete database, which many universities subscribe to, in the days before or (in my university's case) just after the beginning of the fall semester, seems unconscionable to me. It is consistent with the predatory behavior some other academic publishers\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2022\/09\/Screen-Shot-2022-09-28-at-10.35.12-AM.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2022\/09\/Screen-Shot-2022-09-28-at-10.35.12-AM.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2022\/09\/Screen-Shot-2022-09-28-at-10.35.12-AM.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2022\/09\/Screen-Shot-2022-09-28-at-10.35.12-AM.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2022\/09\/Screen-Shot-2022-09-28-at-10.35.12-AM.png?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":10458,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2020\/03\/30\/pandemic-politics-on-disaster-capitalism-socialism-and-environmentalism-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":9656,"position":1},"title":"Pandemic politics: on disaster capitalism, socialism, and environmentalism","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 30, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"This was originally posted over a week ago, but then taken down by request as it was being considered for publication elsewhere (but not published there). A shorter version of it appeared yesterday at VT Digger. The school I work for, the University of Vermont's Rubenstein School of Environment and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/03\/Screen-Shot-2020-03-18-at-1.55.35-PM.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/03\/Screen-Shot-2020-03-18-at-1.55.35-PM.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/03\/Screen-Shot-2020-03-18-at-1.55.35-PM.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/03\/Screen-Shot-2020-03-18-at-1.55.35-PM.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/03\/Screen-Shot-2020-03-18-at-1.55.35-PM.png?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":9596,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2018\/04\/11\/the-5-ds\/","url_meta":{"origin":9656,"position":2},"title":"The 5 D’s","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 11, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"... that might get humans to pull through the next few centuries relatively intact as a species (if not undiminished or unscathed): Decarbonization, Deplasticization, Demilitarization, Decolonization, and Demographic Transition. The first, Decarbonization, entails a dramatic reduction in industrial production of atmospheric carbon (and other greenhouse gas) emissions. It will keep\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2018\/04\/BN-QJ486_NUMBER_GR_20161020150032-275x179.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9316,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/06\/23\/bioregionalism-primer\/","url_meta":{"origin":9656,"position":3},"title":"Bioregionalism primer","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 23, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"When I began my involvement with environmental politics in the 1980s, the main currents of radical or critical thought were represented by deep ecologists\u00a0(or biocentrists), social ecologists (gathered around Murray Bookchin and his Institute for Social Ecology), and ecofeminists, and they seemed more at odds with each other than united.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13861,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2025\/12\/31\/books-of-the-quarter-century-in-ecocultural-theory\/","url_meta":{"origin":9656,"position":4},"title":"Books of the quarter-century in ecocultural theory","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 31, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"We're now a quarter of the way into the present century, and what a rollercoaster it's become. Every ten years this century I've posted a list of the \"Books of the Decade in Ecocultural Theory.\" (The last one was here; the previous, here.) Given how quickly things are evolving --\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/12\/image.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/12\/image.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/12\/image.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/12\/image.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":5259,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/09\/08\/good-news-bad-news\/","url_meta":{"origin":9656,"position":5},"title":"Good news, bad news…","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 8, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"As I think about our Environmental Studies curriculum (I'm Acting Director this semester) and start to think about my Nature and Culture course (which I'll be teaching in January), I come around to the question of how to conceptualize the fraught relationship between humans and everything else. The Nature and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/09\/good_news_bad_news-275x206.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9656"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9673,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9656\/revisions\/9673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}