Still reeling from the global financial crisis, and from discovering how climate change had been denied and obfuscated by Big Oil for decades, I vividly remember the impact and betrayal of the tripling of tuition fees by the UK coalition government in 2010. I’d worked hard to stay in uni and keep my grades up, working twenty hours a week in bars to earn my rent, having chosen to opt out of the tuition grant knowing this would add to the eventual loan I had to repay.
I had no financial support. Getting into higher education at a good university was not something I just walked into. It was a conscious choice. I remember thinking an apprenticeship was also an option. I didn’t think I was all that smart, but I knew I could work hard. I’d been reeled in by Tony Blair’s ‘education, education, education’ push, thinking I could leverage the odds through grit and application. Many of us were led into thinking a degree would guarantee a good job.
Not so.
Hard reality check. Most jobs were now asking for 3 years work experience and a master’s.
Should I get one? Ah, I see those fees have gone up now too. ‘Just get a job in an office like the rest of us’.
Struggling to find paid work relevant to the degree I’d invested so much in, I decided to leave England. I was an economic migrant priced out of higher education after failed banks stuffed with sub-prime mortgages and complex derivative debts were bailed out (earning people like Rishi Sunak millions in the process). I could see the egregious, socially unjust, economic equation at work, and spent the next years piecing together how it had been allowed to happen, and what we could do to prevent climate breakdown by transforming the organisations culpable.
After working as a horticultural assistant in south-west France, and as an English tutor in Italy, I eventually landed on my feet in Uppsala, Sweden. I remember anxiously waiting to hear back from my master’s applications, whilst teaching at a summer camp in the Casalese Monferrrato hills, mulling over going back home to join the RAF if it didn’t work out. I was over the moon and relieved to hear I’d gotten into Uppsala University to study a two-year international programme in sustainable development that would completely change my outlook and prospects. Luckily, because I was then a European citizen, I was able to pursue my master’s without having to pay tuition fees. I couldn’t have considered it otherwise.
Due to the gross act of national self-harm, popular deception, and capital asset grab1 that was Brexit, this right was yanked away from tens of thousands of British young people who could have benefitted from studying in Europe. An education that could be attained more affordably at the same or higher quality; crucial for those from less-privileged backgrounds, now deterred from these opportunities, and/or saddled with a lifetime of debt. No thanks to Nigel Farage and his mates, who have the audacity, and cynicism - in their fascist attempt to divide us, sow hatred, and sway a depleted electorate - to call those of us who managed to claw our way up elites, themselves having comfortably benefitted from the same elite institutions they so fervently now denounce.
My anger about this, and the decades of denial around the climate crisis, drove me for a long time, leading me, ironically, or serendipitously, to my PhD about how to transform higher education institutions for sustainability. I saw it as a real job. It paid a monthly salary which allowed me to turn down the other meager intern or entry-level offers that barely covered living expenses.
For me, education was something precious and transformative. A privilege that has the power to liberate hearts, minds and communities; as we are now seeing with powerful uprisings for social and climate justice from student movements, organisers and activists globally. It also helped me to transcend the adverse circumstances of my childhood and adolescence. I guess, on some level, I remained in the university to make the changes I thought were needed, feeling connected to those shut out, despite their intelligence, intellect and talent, because I’d had to fight my way in. I first felt this connection behind a bar in Manchester talking about all the hows of the financial and political system that had f**cked us with a bunch of so-called scallies. I would have never been able to have that discussion in my classes, making unlikely connections across externally imposed divides - pints in one hand, book in the other.
This is why it was always personal for me. Later, during my first years as a PhD student researching how to transform universities, I delved into what they were actually for, before embedding myself in their potential for change.
I found that the rest of the literature2 largely agreed: universities are an inherent public good, capable of enabling social mobility, reducing injustice and creating positive social and environmental impact. They have a key role in preparing young people to contribute to society and respond to multiple crises, as well as help wider society navigate and remodel a better world. I concluded that the current model of governing universities has not worked and is in dire need of wholesale transformation with intent from the bottom up. The evidence of this is everywhere - from universities struggling with new poorly-informed, reactionary government directives designed to win votes, to those disproportionately behoven to the interests of corporations that actively disregard planetary boundaries in the interests of unhinged greed.
I am by far not the first to say we have to fundamentally rethink higher education, precisely because I remain convinced universities are key to our fight to combat the climate crisis, restoring societal wellbeing whilst enshrining human rights and safe harbour for all. Nonetheless, and frustratingly, at their worst, I have witnessed some becoming increasingly brittle, fickle and reactionary places under external pressure and internal protests, which reinforce inferiority complexes and mindsets of distrust, competition and arrogance. I do not wish this to be the case, knowing full well the inherent potential, but could not ignore what I was seeing.
Since leaving my last university role in February this year, I’ve been setting myself up as an independent consultant, building relationships across and outside of the sector. My reflections in this piece came from a proposal I made for a potential workshop on university transformation for Erasmus University Rotterdam’s Sustainability Summit, and subsequently, its Design Impact Transition (DIT) platform. I was excited at this new prospect - however, due to reasons out of their control, the workshop had to be postponed. I learnt later that this was indirectly due to the Free Palestine protests that spread like wildfire across universities in the US, UK, and here in the Netherlands, as well as other European countries. Expressing solidarity with this movement, I struggled to understand the risk posed to a campus sustainability event, except the possibility of a predictably ham-fisted, disproportionate response from the authorities.
Anyway, I digress: the first summit was cancelled and speakers were moved across to the DIT’s day, leaving less room for me. Disappointed, yet trying to understand the circumstances, I developed my proposal further as I did not want it to go to waste, and felt the creative need to share in case my experiences and recommendations could be of use. Respecting their reasons, and open to coming back, I’m already sharing my thoughts on what universities can do to enable a just and sustainable society.
What can universities do to enable a just and sustainable society?
Facilitate practice on how to transform fragmented university organisations internally so that they can better fulfil their roles as stewards for sustainable and just futures externally.
My research and practical experiences demonstrated that universities must first dedicate significant resources to their internal transformations so that they can better fulfil their potential roles as stewards, knowledge brokers, capacity builders and innovation hubs for people and planet.
In this respect, I think programmes aspiring be to transformative could benefit from a holistic focus on the complex, often Kafka-esque, university organisation, from a leadership perspective (activist, intrapreneur, or exec), and indeed, in terms of key decisions that need to be made to spur along change, and streamline inertia. This whole institution3 approach to sustainability in higher education is well-informed in the literature. Yet, in my research, I found that the work to make explicit what transformative leadership and agency (and the communities that must arise to enact change) look like is lacking, especially concerning the psychology of navigating and leading change. Not to mention providing the necessary training to managers, executives, staff and students alike to allow for its emergence and wider impact.
The Intersection of DEI, transformative agency, and community-driven action
As part of the internal discussion university communities need to have on transforming the institution around them as embedded insiders, I highly recommend key perspectives on intersectionality (as spearheaded and conceived by Kimberlé Crenshaw4) to make the transition three things: diverse, in terms of skills, background and identity; inclusive, in creating ethical pathways for the marginalised, oppressed and discriminated to autonomously play a role; and equitable, in allowing the same opportunities and rebalancing injustice, mindful of class, gender, sex, race or neurodivergence. Allowing for an intersectional approach to sustainability transformation unlocks obvious benefits in innovation, continuity and problem-solving, whilst hewing to the pragmatic and emancipatory roots of action research. This gives the community the chance to define key terms, building agency, intention and awareness into the process.
Recommendations for solving the problem of universities transforming themselves:
How universities transform themselves against the backdrop of institutional infrastructure and external shocks defines their internal organisational transitions for sustainability. How you respond matters. Avoid reactionary policies and be intentional and deliberate in the change.
Universities are not merely passive receivers of policy. They have transformative agency as they are at the crucible of societal impact, knowledge production, innovation and learning. They unite the public, civil society and private sectors like no other institution can. So long as we do not leverage this innate power to enact meaningful change, universities risk becoming obsolete, co-opted by corporations and governments alike.
Universities wrestle with the bureaucracy, fragmentation and power structures of the traditional institutional model that is hundreds of years out-of-date. We need to get creative and experimental with how we intentionally redesign them from the inside out, and from top to bottom.
Key obstacles, such as a lack of incentivisation in the promotion and tenure of faculty, and a widespread mental health crisis of burnout and toxic, bordering on abusive behaviour, prevent internal strategies for transition from taking shape. Administrators and executives must learn to consciously invest in the career and impact trajectories of their own students and staff and to ensure those from marginalised groups have equal opportunities, are amplified, and respected.
We know from experience that time is a scarce commodity, as well as the complicating factors of access to information, transparency, and lack of inter-faculty connections. This needs to be overcome by involving a democratic ‘club of academics’, leveraging the ‘faculty as a guild’, ‘who are willing to be measured beyond traditional research and educational measures’. I witnessed this practice during my second PhD case study at Arizona State University, in the Global Institute of Sustainability’s efforts to build transdisciplinary bridges.
Galvanising for Systemic Change
Moving forward on all this requires a systemic approach, looking at the organisational in fully rethought missions, connecting research, education, engagement, governance and operations.
In my PhD, and afterwards, together with Green Offices, I validated the approach that emerged from the work as we ran embedded action research inside university organisations. I believe we need to do more action research on universities to unlock latent potential and realisable solutions from teams of students, staff and administrators, who are then - by dint of their inclusion and empowerment in the research on their own organisaiton - better able to catalyse transitions in governance and community.
We saw this in practice in 2023, with the Sustainability Dialogues I led with Green Hub Twente, where we rigorously documented the living process into outcomes that grounded a working paper for the community to define its own sustainability transformation5.
This seems to fit the university events I’ve offered to facilitate, organised around the call for accelerating the transformation of and in academia. I’ve already started to share what catalysing sustainability transformation in action looks like from my own perspective, and that of the teams facilitated; the insider view I’d become too embedded within. I never intended to be an academic. It was a good job, aligned with my interests, skills and values that other people thought I was good at, until how I did it became inconvenient. I was just trying to get by, whilst figuring out a system that functioned and profited from rupturing society and the environment. I never forgot Manchester.
Scanning the political environment now that the Netherlands’ parliament has lurched far to the right, I sense higher education organisations here will need to galvanise themselves from the bottom up, banding together to resist reactionary, poorly thought-through austerity policies that threaten to hinder the transformative, often youth-driven movement for people and planet. We sit at a crucial moment, a turning point, and it is up to all leaders in these institutions to avoid the ‘shock-and-awe’ tactics of cutbacks undermining progress for climate education, impactful research, and systemic outreach. Let’s dance on the shoulders of our giants, who don’t wear the frilly attire, or speak the loudest, with the biggest words, who show us the way forward through their radical thinking and action. For me, it’s this wave that brought me here, and that which gives me the most hope.
“Making a switch to sustainable development requires deep, structural transformation in our economic, cultural and technological systems.
We need new ways of interpreting, analysing, and understanding the world, and we need new tools to help us deal with tumultuous changes and an uncertain future.
If higher education is to play a meaningful role in this undertaking, then we will need to reshape its institutions, its pedagogy, and organization.”Steven Volk6, Professor of History Emeritus, Oberlin College
See the antics of Aaron Banks and Crispin Odey as examples – best for another article on all that.
Soon to be published in its final White Paper form in both English and Dutch, and upcoming as more a expansive look into Bottom-up Sustainability Transformation in a Special Issue of the International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education.
Original source, CEMUS website, About. See his blog on the inspiration for this quote, at the student-initiated, interdisciplinary centre, CEMUS, Uppsala, Sweden where I also studied.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.