Why Johnny Can't Jump-Start

One of our favorite blogs is "Getting to Green" at Inside Higher Ed, written by an anonymous person who we believe is a SCUP member and who goes by the pseudonym "G. Rendell." He has assured us, BTW, that he will be joining us at SCUP–44 in Portland, July 18–22 this summer. In this post, he finds an engineering grad he wouldn't trust to jump-start his car and writes about the relationship between that and how higher education helped us get into the sustainability mess we're in, in the first place:

He’ll be graduating with a BS in engineering from a respected school, and he was confused when a household light bulb (120 volts, 60 watts) didn’t seem to be lighting up from a flow of 12-volt current. In a nutshell, this guy might be an engineer with (soon) an honors diploma, but I wouldn’t trust him to jump-start my car.

This student might be an extreme case, but in some ways I think his story exemplifies why college and university graduates have created a world (society, economy) with a sustainability crisis, and why colleges and (especially) universities are having a hard time making the cultural change necessary to make that crisis go away. We don’t do a good job of connecting subject matter to real world problems/applications. We don’t even do a good job of connecting it to closely related subject matter (like other engineering specialties).