too long for a tweet, too short for a blog post...
In a (very early stage) planning meeting for a major Canadian conference around community-university partnerships, set to take place in Waterloo Region in May 2011. The theme of the conference is "Bringing Global Perspectives to Local Action". More information can be found at www.cuexpo2011.ca
The last CUExpo took place in Victoria, BC in 2008.Below is an interesting opinion editorial that appeared in the NY Times a couple of days ago, and it relates to some of the work that SiG@Waterloo is doing through the development of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation (WICI), being spearheaded by Thomas Homer-Dixon, Frances Westley and a number of other professors at the University of Waterloo.
Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation
In the coming decades, rapid systemic change on multiple levels will contribute to global problems, potentially inducing pandemics, violent meteorological events, and social and political unrest. The weakening of national public institutions, widening gaps between rich and poor, increasing scarcity of high-quality energy, and worsening damage to the global environment coupled with increased global connectivity will erode systemic resilience and boost the incidence of surprising and even catastrophic change.
The goals of the Waterloo Institute are to:
Develop a common, transdisciplinary language and methodology and an integrated, coherent theory for the study and pedagogy of complex adaptive systems; and, • Apply these tools to stimulate rapid and beneficial innovation that will increase the resilience of complex adaptive systems worldwide – including social, political, economic, and ecological systems – that are currently under threat.
If you are interested in finding out more about WICI, please check out the videos of all of the WICI Seminar Series, that began last September 2008. They are available here
End the University as We Know It
The world is certainly changing, and there seems to be a groundswell of people waking up and realizing that we need to change our mindset and the way we live/organize ourselves as a society (local, national, global), in order to adapt and become resilient as we face the challenges of the road ahead.
It seems that Mark Taylor, Chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University, who penned the NY Times opinion editorial below, argues that our institutions of higher education and learning need to adapt to this changing world as well.
Op-Ed Contributor
End the University as We Know It
By MARK C. TAYLOR
Published: April 26, 2009
GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities.... The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course - with no benefits - than it is to hire full-time professors.
In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.
Mark Taylor then goes on to outline six ways in which these institutions of higher learning can change in order to become more adaptive to the complexities of the problems we face in the 21st century (summaries below):
1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding to undergraduate programs, where the curriculum is like a web or complex adaptive network, where teaching and scholarship are cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.
2. Get rid of permanent departments at universities, and instead, create problem-focused programs, such as a Water Program, where the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose very significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties in the coming future, as well as serious political and economic challenges. These programs will have a limited time-frame and will be constantly evaluated, resulting in the program being abolished, continued or significantly changed.
3. Encourage increased collaboration among institutions, leveraging the internet and online video-conference tools as a means of communication.
4. Transform the traditional dissertation of published "books" with more footnotes than text, and encourage graduate students to produce "theses" in alternative formats, using analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites, to films and video games.
5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students, exposing them to new approaches, different cultures as well as real-life considerations, helping them cultivate skills that will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.
6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure, and replace it with seven-year contracts, enabling colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.
