How to Get the Academic Side of Things More in Synch With Sustainability

It should be especially interesting to SCUPers that some very intriguing thoughts about curriculum change are coming from the anonymous Getting to Green blogger, G. Rendell. His latest post is titled "Realistic Radicalism."

[David Orr is] quoted as saying, “The main architecture of the curricula is sacrosanct ... Conversations still don’t easily cross back and forth between disciplines. And anything that begins to threaten that structure dies a pretty quick and painful death.” . . . In a nutshell, the complexity inherent in the information we need to exist in this world intelligently has surpassed the organizational capacities of our current system of academic disciplines. . . . So here’s a modest proposal — no more single-subject, or even single-faculty (in the British usage) degrees. If your major is already trans-disciplinary, you’re fine. If you have two majors, drawing on differing academic traditions, you’re fine. However, if you’re majoring only in a subject among the humanities, you need to at least minor in a social or a physical science. If you’re majoring only in a physical science, you need to at least minor in one of the humanities or social sciences. And so forth.

As a solution to strict disciplinary thinking, this is an incomplete solution. But it’s one which could be implemented more quickly and with less resistance (note, not zero resistance) than a true trans-disciplinary reworking of the academic organization.