The Nature of College. James J. Farrell
human beings have ever experienced. Earth is not just getting warmer, it’s warming and cooling, getting wetter and drier, becoming stormier and increasingly unstable. To make matters worse, “weirding” is a feedback loop, responding in ways that reinforce these problematic tendencies. As ice melts, more heat is absorbed into oceans. As tundra melts, more methane leaks into the atmosphere, accelerating the greenhouse effect. At current rates of change, in the year 2100 New York will have as many 100-degree days as Miami does now, and coastal colleges and universities maybe underwater in more than just a financial sense.
Students learn a lot in college, but most students aren’t learning what they need to create a restorative society, a hospitable earth, and a future with college campuses securely above water. Colleges now need to provide the knowledge and practices humans need for the future, to show in word and deed how a sustainable society might work. A college that wants to remain relevant to its students will teach them how to be leaders in the ecological transition of the twenty-first century. If it works right, a college education will teach students to develop what David Orr calls “designing minds,” minds that are prepared to design a good society in harmony with nature. Orr suggests that higher education should be designed “1. to equip young people with a basic understanding of systems and to develop habits of mind that seek out ‘patterns that connect’ human and natural systems; 2. to teach young people the analytical skills necessary for thinking accurately about cause and effect; 3. to give students the practical competence necessary to solve local problems; and 4. to teach young people the habit of rolling up their sleeves and getting down to work.” Institutions of higher education have always prepared students to succeed in the so-called real world. Our colleges and universities now need to teach students how to live responsibly on the planet as well.
Today’s colleges aren’t yet ready for this challenge, but students can pressure them to live up to the promise of mission statements that claim to prepare people for the future. In the 1960s, Paul Goodman challenged students: “Think about the kind of world you want to live and work in. What do you need to know to help build that world? Demand that your teachers teach you that.” Much of the time, sadly, this advice is ignored. Most of us know, deep down, that we need an ecological revolution to build a new world that is sustainable—ecologically, economically, socially, and personally. Too often, however, students take courses to complete requirements instead of requiring that their courses help to build this better world. They hardly ever demand enough from their professors or their education. That’s what this book is for. Uncovering the intellectual and emotional patterns that connect us to the degradation of nature, we’ll discover new patterns of thinking and acting to create the world we want to live and work in.1
Introduction: A Reader’s Guide
I went to (college) because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (amended)
Think about the kind of world you want to live and work in.
What do you need to know to help build that world? Demand
that your teachers teach you that.
Paul Goodman, “The Duty of Professionals”
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.
Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
There are all sorts of books advising students how to read, but not a lot on how to engage an author in a constructive dialogue. Colleges have courses in creative writing, but not in creative reading, which is the art of reading in conversation. At its best, a book is one voice in an ongoing conversation, contributing corrections and corroborations, new ideas and insights, and waiting for a response. Because any conversation works best when the questions and conceptual frameworks are fully understood, I offer them here in the clearest form possible:
The Questions
• What are the key components of American college culture?
• Why do we act the way we do?
• What do we really value and why?
• Why do we act in ways that contradict our values?
• Why do we consume so much?
• Why isn’t our common sense sensible anymore?
• How much of our lives is intentional, and how much merely habitual?
• Why is it so hard to talk about things that really matter to us?
• What are the roots of hope and change?
The Frameworks
1) The Culture of Nature
Because this book plays at the intersection of American studies and environmental studies, a basic assumption is that we always experience nature through cultural frames, that the American eye is always connected to the American “I,” and that Americans grow up learning certain ways of seeing nature. One of those ways, for example, is Romantic: We see nature through the eyes of nineteenth-century landscape painters who saw nature and wilderness both as counterpoint to civilization, and as escape from it. This explains how car manufacturers can sell us environmentally destructive SUVs by advertising them in cultural landscapes that look “natural” to us, like a stunningly beautiful beach or a striking mountain scene. Because of Romantic assumptions that conflate nature and wilderness, most of us don’t think that we’re interacting with nature unless we find ourselves in an officially designated wilderness area.
But we are always in nature, as a second way of seeing, called “resourcism,” suggests. Resourcism interprets the natural world mainly as natural resources, useful to supply human desires, but not as a living, breathing community of organisms. Surrounded by resources repurposed as products all the time, we are always in nature. The concept of “the culture of nature” doesn’t mean that nature is only cultural; nature is clearly a dynamic force of its own. And it doesn’t mean that people aren’t nature. Despite all our cleverness and intelligence, we remain bifocal, bipedal, big-brained mammals. But we’ve invented a “culture of nature,” so, once we’re socialized, we always come to understand nature through culture.
This culture of nature is part of college culture, which is a subset of American youth culture, a twentieth-century development that increasingly gives young people the freedom to make sense of the world by themselves. Profs control the official curriculum, but students teach each other the hidden curriculum of college—beliefs and behavior shaped without much conscientious consideration. This hidden education is, environmentally speaking, generally more important than what is learned in classes. Students may take a few credits in environmental studies, but they live their environmental values every minute of every day and exemplify them to their friends. When they graduate, therefore, those practiced values, good and bad, tend to become the “culture of nature” for the next generation.
It’s one of the functions of culture to teach us what’s “natural”—in two ways. The first type of “natural” is what’s normal, expected, routine. We think “it’s only natural” to live in buildings with bathrooms, to eat three meals a day, or to party on the weekends. In this sense, the word “natural” generally means “cultural,” and the word “natural” is employed because it seems less arbitrary, and therefore more compelling, than the word “cultural.” If we say “it’s only natural to eat meat,” it’s a lot more powerful than saying “it’s only cultural to eat meat.” In this way, culture naturalizes itself, trying