What Matters: Higher Education Now

In early 2024, the Council on the Uncertain Human Future began a series of Threshold Councils to explore fundamental questions about the present historical moment. One of them focused on higher education, posing the question: What matters now in higher education?

In these intentional gatherings, members of CUHF councils engage in deep exploration of human and planetary questions, history and experience. The council practice itself is ancient and simple; people convene in a circle and, passing a talking piece, speak in sequence. Participants are invited to come present, reflect on the questions posed, listen fully and speak spontaneously, from the heart.

Participants included active and emeritus faculty and administrative staff from U.S. institutions of higher learning and those involved in educational initiatives and programming. They represented a diversity of institutional types, from community college to elite private university to nonprofits, and a variety of disciplines, mostly in the humanities and social sciences.

Prior to the sessions, participants were asked to submit brief written responses to this prompt:

What matters most in the context of higher ed, and how it might shape-shift for these times? If we could lean into the cracks (Báyò Akómoláfé) together...what spaces and practices might arise? What really matters for our students, ourselves, the earth?

These writings, along with a few other contributions, are collected here.

While the authors collected here articulate a number of problems with the educational status quo, they conclude that the institution of American higher education, for all its abundant flaws, is worth defending. The core traditions of academic freedom and self-governance are invaluable. When the university lives up to its articulated ideals, it offers a space to ask difficult questions in a spirit of free inquiry and intellectual honesty. In this society, such a space is a rare and precious resource.

At a scale much larger than the current American political crisis, the human place in the natural world and our relationships with one another constitute an evolving polycrisis. The authors in this collection offer a variety of thoughts on the role of higher education in addressing the crisis; some even suggest that subversive alternatives may emerge in the cracks of newly weakened institutions.

The writings in this collection articulate the authors' understandings of what this present moment in human history represents and what that means for universities. They offer critiques of the status quo in higher education, explain why the current system is inadequate to address this historical moment, and offer ideas about how higher education can transform itself to respond to the polycrisis and better serve the needs of students and the broader society.

While the authors have their individual perspectives, they share broad consensus on several points. The structures of the socio-environmental present are rupturing, and the future will not replicate the past. Current educational institutions were built to serve a 20th-century capitalist modernity which is in the process of unraveling. Humans must repair the dominant society's separation from nature and bridge the chasms we have created amongst ourselves. A responsive higher educational community would honor the emotional, spiritual, and embodied dimensions of its members' lives as well as their intellectual capacity. A higher education actually useful to society would base its teaching and research on bedrock principles and creative imaginings acknowledging the limits of the living earth as well as her awesome regenerative powers. Human survival requires fundamental transformation.