Thanks to Stephen Sterling for alerting me to Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism – a report published by the National Association of Scholars [NAS] which says of it:
"Sustainability” is a key idea on college campuses in the United States and the rest of the Western world. To many, sustainability is just a new name for environmentalism. But the word has come to mean something much larger: an ideology that demands new limits on economic, political, and intellectual freedom as the price that must be paid to ensure the welfare of future generations.
This report is the first in-depth critical examination of the sustainability movement in higher education. The movement, of course, extends well beyond the college campus. But the college campus is where the movement gets its voice of authority, and where it molds the views and commands the attention of young people"
Well, at 262 pages, this is long; but if that puts you off, here's a short version (12 pages). I'm going to start with that to see if I have the energy to delve further. I'm tempted to do that anyway because of what Stanley Fish has to say about it.
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NAS is
"a network of scholars and citizens united by a commitment to academic freedom, disinterested scholarship, and excellence in American higher education. We uphold the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship. We expect that ideas will be judged on their merits; that scholars will engage in disinterested research; and that colleges and universities will provide for fair and judicial examination and debate of contending views."
Responses
The short summary supports Scott-style scepticism about the ideological bias to which schooling can succumb. Of course, there are other more potent ideologies evident in higher education not often openly confronted. They serve the hegemonic corporate agenda on a trajectory towards global collapse. The ideology of human well-being via exponential economic growth irrespective of its impact on a finite planet springs to mind. Promoting national competitiveness in the race for wealth is another. But exposing ideological biases of all types and their likely consequences must itself be a central function of university education. many thanks for the link to this NAS paper.