(00:01):
Well, I'm in over my head. No one told me Trying to keep my footprints small was harder than I thought it could be. I'm in over my head. What do I really need? Trying to save the planet oh will someone please save me? Trying to save the planet oh will someone please save me?

(00:24):
Welcome to In Over My Head. I'm Michael Bartz. My guest today is Michael Maniates. Michael, a professor of social science at Yale NSU College in Singapore is a teacher-scholar of environmental studies with deep roots in undergraduate education, his research and writing center on environmental politics and governance, with a special focus on sustainable consumption and production transition theory and drivers of policy change. Michael is best known for his scholarly work on paths to low consumption and high prosperity futures. In addition to his scholarly achievements, Michael is an experienced leader within higher education, notably filling key teacher administrative positions for the award-winning semester at sea program. He has six voyages under his belt and he hopes to embark on another semester-long sailing in 2025. Welcome to In Over My Head, Michael.

(01:07):
Thank you, Michael. Thank you so much for having me. A real pleasure and a privilege.

(01:11):
So, while looking into de-growth, one aspect that I found fascinating is the role of post-secondary in our current system. Higher education depends on and promotes economic growth, but in a world where growth is no longer the focus, I'm curious how postsecondary will change your article. Higher education for a post-growth world addresses this. So I'm looking forward to talking with you. To start, I think it might be helpful for you to explain in your own words, the current relationship between economic growth and higher education.

(01:36):
yeah, I'd be happy to. Let me take at least take a quick shot at it. You know, for about 150 years, higher education has been in the business of enhancing human prosperity and human prosperity has been has been at least in contemporary thinking you know, reaching back that far to be linked to economic growth. And, and in particular the increase in material throughput. The more mining, the more production, the more innovation, the more goods, the more services, the more employment. And you know, that's just been how we have thought about prosperity for, for, for a great deal of time and higher education set up to facilitate that in many respects either indirectly by educating people who can become captains of industry or perhaps just minions sort of grinding away, or perhaps more importantly, higher education is a source of, of innovation and of efficiencies that can lead to more and more production and consumption at lower costs, all sort of driving this this growth in the material throughput and overall consumption.

(02:31):
And I guess before I go much further, I should say, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I mean, there have been some remarkable achievements over the last hundred, one 50 years. I mean, life expectancy has gone up. Infant mortality has gone down, and waterborne illnesses have declined. I mean, all kinds of wonderful things have come from this, this jogger not really of economic growth. And we've experienced, especially after 1950, oh my goodness, but at least where I live in the environmental science environmental studies field we may have reached the end of the, of the flat out no questions asked, utility of that growth as we approach a whole variety of, of echo limits.

(03:05):
Yeah, no, no, that's a good point that, you know, prosperity in itself. There have been a lot of good things that have come out of that. But yeah, definitely that shift in, okay, maybe we have to look at possibly a lower growth future post-growth. What do you imagine post-secondary might look like if we aren't embracing growth as much?

(03:23):
You know, when we think about higher education, there, there are, there are so many different faces and trajectories. You know, we've got everything from, at least in the United States experience sort of small liberal arts colleges to these large sort of research one, basically research universities that are focused on on producing new knowledge and innovations. And again, all of this is, is important and good, but if if we are facing a future of continued ecological overshoot, now we're using about 1.7, 1.8 planets. The environmental scientists tell us now in terms of the impact on ecosystems, and we've just got one planet here, that means that we are undermining natural systems, fisheries, soils, aquifers of the climate upon which human prosperity depends. If we're in the situation where we face ecological overshoot, it likely makes sense to consider what powering down to look like.

(04:16):
And, you know, and here, higher education has not been terribly nimble. I'm not coming directly to your question, but maybe just a set stage. Higher education is at least where, where I live, sort of this country of my citizenship. The US has, there's been a huge push in the last 15 years towards a kind of greening the university. And we, and we see this in Canada as well, and across Europe of recycling of decarbonizing sort of energy flows of increased energy efficiency. I mean, all of these things are, are really important, but they are they're just incommensurate with the challenge before us. I mean, even with these things going on, these great programs happening of, of solar panels on university roofs and composting and ambitious recycling programs, they're still in a situation where this ecological overshoot just to sheer growth in the consumption and production of resources, most of it in the top 20% of the world is just swamping the good intentions of those smaller micro actions.

(05:13):
And so it may be time for higher education and begin thinking about ways not just of doing this kind of technological innovation studies of how to make solar panels more effective and efficient, but also thinking about social innovation, social innovations that would make it much easier for the technologists to save the world because they wouldn't always be sort of swimming against the current of massive growth social innovations that could help us figure out how to squeeze more happiness and human prosperity out of smaller and smaller units of material throughput and economic growth in the economy. And just to wrap up this little bit, let me just say that I'm, when you hear me say this, I'm really thinking about the over consumers of the world, the top 20 or 25% of the world, who it seems to me and, and to others of course, as well, really need to be thinking about ways of radically shrinking our ecological footprint if we're gonna create the ecological space for the 4 billion poor people to come up and increase sort of their consumption.

(06:08):
And so it really, it's on us in a rich role to be thinking in creative ways about how we become happier, more secure and fairer with lower growth, flat growth, perhaps even negative growth in stuff that's moving through the economy. I guess we circled back then to your question of what is it that higher education can do and, and it would begin to think about a set of these social innovations, both focused research on these innovations as well as using the university as higher education as a demonstration plot or site for a host of innovation.

(06:42):
No, absolutely. I think, yeah, when you're focused on various sustainable initiatives within post-secondary, like you said, composting, recycling, solar modules on the roof, although those things are inherently good. Yeah. What interests me so much about looking at de-growth and post-growth is that instead of doing all of this extra work in order to make ourselves net zero carbon neutral of those things by slowing down, and like you said, focusing on more social innovation, how do we address other problems that actually seems like potentially an easier way to solve things. Right. but I guess, yeah, what really interests me with post-secondary specifically is that it's so much tied to growth, you know, because if for some reason a university wasn't taking in new students, they weren't building new buildings, they didn't have new programs, you'd think that, oh, this university isn't actually growing, they're not actually successful. So I think it's the, they're very much tied together, right?

(07:39):
Oh, absolutely. And those are great examples. So thank you for those. In addition, I could speak for my experience in Singapore where, where I'm part of this Yale National University of Singapore experiment in bringing liberal arts college to Singapore, the prime flagship institution in Singapore and us, you know, it justifies itself to the government and justifies itself to itself by pointing to all of the innovations and training directly, indirectly that it's done to sort of help grow production and to show new ways of, of capturing efficiencies in the production process. Efficiency sounds like a great thing, but, but what we know through this thing called the Jins paradox is that when you become more efficient in the production of something, you actually see more often than not increased consumption of that thing over time because the price drops, it becomes attractive technology facilitates a greater consumption.

(08:28):
And, and in the US where I was for more than a quarter of a century, it's certainly true as well that we had to keep building new buildings and launching new programs and then justifying our budgets to to the state or, or, or to large donors by showing that our graduates were getting good jobs and that we were contributing to the economic growth. Here is, I guess, coming back full circle to the community, to the region, to the country. And this isn't to say that economic growth isn't important, it's the only option in town for security and community and happiness. But I, I think what we're both zooming in on here is that there need to be ways of thinking about other paths through. And, and so we know what some of those paths are, at least in theory with some practice about what, what kind of social innovations would make sense for a low-growth economy. And we can talk about those in a second if that'd be useful.

(09:15):
Yeah, do it. Yeah. What are some of those options?

(09:17):
You know, one is just to adapt. There's an adaptive function the university can play. We are pretty certain that we're gonna be seeing lower rates of economic growth in much of the so-called rich world as we see population growth rates fall or even go negative. And as we see economies beginning to, to drag as a result of you know, for people or just having smaller families. And so one way of thinking about the the university's sort of role is it, it can help it can help us adapt, anticipate lower growth. Another way to think about it is from an environmental standpoint as we've been talking, it probably makes sense to be kind of proactive in reducing growth. Now, my way of thinking, let's just do the adaptation thing. We can just say, Hey, look, it's gonna be lower growth.

(09:55):
What are the social innovations to help people squeeze more good out of it? And if we get that done, it makes it easier for folks like you and me to make the argument that we ought to be thinking actively about adopting these innovations to get to a de-growth model, to save the climate among other things. You know, we don't have to make that argument that we are saving the the environment necessarily. We can just point to this as sort of a rational way of adapting to lower growth. So I mean, the thing that everyone talks about, and perhaps you've recovered it in earlier conversations, is reduced work hours. And we're beginning to see some, some, a real sort of movement to reduced work hours now around the world as a result of sort of the dislocations in workplace organizing with covid.

(10:33):
And so the thinking here is if you get people to work less, what we find is that they're spending less time commuting, for example. And they may actually be be, be consuming less. So there are two wrinkles to this work, less sort of approach. There is the wrinkle we're seeing now, and then there's the deeper wrinkle. Can I use that, that metaphor, the deeper, I think we're gonna need an iron here at some point. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The you know, the, the wrinkle we're seeing now, and we, you know, we're seeing it in Spain, we're seeing a tryout in the United Kingdom. We're seeing a lot of Fortune 500 companies do it, is that we'll have people work four days a week, but we'll pay 'em for five. And the rationale here is that Monday morning and Friday afternoon, a whole lot of work just doesn't get done, you know?

(11:12):
And so if you, if you have people who work four days, they're gonna be just, if not more productive than when they're working five. And it's like, God bless you, go for it. That's a great transition. Now that, that's not gonna work for every kind of occupation to be sure. But the deeper sort of approach here is to say, look, we should be working three and a half or four days a week rather than five or more. And we should be making a little less money. And, and, and the making less money thing is the key because you, you've gotta pull money kind of out of circulation. You've gotta reduce consumptive capacity if you're, if you're gonna reduce material throughput, now, you know, I could work four days a week, still make the same amount of money, be a good environmentalist, not spend it on cheap crap from China that I don't neeed, that's destroying the environment.

(11:53):
I can put it in a savings account, whether that money's gonna be used by somebody else and they're gonna draw that money out and they're gonna buy cheap crap they don't need from China. That destroys the environment. So really the idea is to reduce the overall surge circulation. That's a tough nut to crack though, to ask a lot of people to make less, to work less. And there, there need to be preconditions. I mean, there needs to be good support for healthcare, for example. There needs to be support for, for education. There need to be ways in which people can imagine making less and being happier for it. And, and that's again, where the social sort of innovation sort of comes in. So I think what we're seeing playing out across the landscape now, our whole set of programs and efforts that are giving people a four-day work week at full pay thinking that they're being just as productive, in some cases, they're actually more productive cuz they're not burnt out.

(12:41):
The next step, which I think we're gonna be seeing, in the next handful of years, is just giving people the option of working even a little bit less for less pay. And, and I think that's where the movement is right now. It's not forcing anything down people's throats. It's basically saying, would you want the option of working three and a half days a week? Or in some cases, if you haven't had that first sprinkle is an option four days a week and making a little less pay. And I think what we know from experiences and during the financial crisis when people were forced, especially in the us I'm thinking of California in particular, they were forced to work four days a week. Cause the state didn't have the money to pay them five days a week. There was a lot of pushback because people weren't sure how they were gonna make ends meet.

(13:21):
But once the state came back to full budget, a whole lot of folks who initially thought it was a horrible idea did not want to come back to work. And so I, I think the point here, and then I'll come back to higher education is that thinking about how you and I would live on a little less is hard. But given the option, many of us would figure it out. We would be willing to exchange, reduce, pay for more leisure time. And once we figure that out, we could act as models for others. And we, we might begin to see a real shift of people being able to serve of work less, making less, especially if the government comes in and makes it increasingly possible for people to do that. Now, this is where higher education comes in. What does that look like? Wouldn't it be great if we had good research on that?

(14:04):
You know, but public policy programs aren't really interested in that. They're primarily interested in looking at sort of policy changes that actually increase the efficiencies of the economy or deal with some of the, the problems of economic. How do we begin to think about structuring work time regulation in ways that would sort of give people the option of working less? And here's where the university of higher education could really be. Why don't we have universities who call themselves sustainable campuses, actually give their employees the option of working somewhat less for reduced salary, but hey, they keep their full health benefits in those countries where health benefits are tied, they keep their full pension. I mean, you, you, you don't wanna penalize people for doing the right thing, but why not create the option for employees across those units of higher education that say they're sustainable to be able to work less, to potentially make just a bit less and then study that uptake, study the impact on consumption, and be able to make the university a living laboratory for what reduced work time looks like in order to get us to a point where we are working less and we're loving more and we're making a little bit less, but we have the infrastructure around us in terms of perhaps more robust public transportation.

(15:16):
That means we don't need to sort of you know, have two automobiles or even one we've got support and subsidies for education, for healthcare so that we can live more fully by spending less.

(15:27):
Yeah, and I really appreciate that concrete example of just reduced working hours. Like that's something that's like within drowth it seems like there's a lot of maybe idealistic thinking about the, what the world could look like. And I feel like for a lot of people, generally they just need to pay their bills. And if you're reading the news, you know, the cost of living is going up and food and housing, everything. So I think there are a lot of people who are very practically minded who think that like, it's great to have this utopia, but you know, I've got all these expenses. And so I think your example of, okay, we could have reduced working hours, but have more supports in place in order to make your life the same or better, a better quality of life. I think that is a really good example. And when it comes to post-secondary, I guess one thing that comes to mind, you know, you said that those areas aren't as, I guess not a research focus. So why do you think that's the case?

(16:17):
I mean, we do see some research going on. I shouldn't be so glib. The University of San Diego, for instance, has this Meister Institute that's, that's looking at not reduced work hours, but is thinking about a complex of you know, what a worker-owned businesses look like that wouldn't serve be so focused on growth. And then there would be the option within those worker-owned businesses for, for shorter work weeks. Rutgers School of Management is doing a little bit of this as well, but I think in generally it comes back to our, to our opening conversation is that higher education is geared right now to thinking about sustainability in the same way that so many of my students think about sustainability, right? I mean, the way that we save the planet at an individual level, it's sometimes thought is we recycle, we try to eat less meat, we try not to fly as much, and we hope that all of these things add up to something that's being sufficient to save the the planet.

(17:08):
And look, I'd say, I think all those things are really important and good, and they've gotta happen because they kind of model, they serve as a daily reminder for, for us as we're doing those practices about what's important. But gosh, when you add all those, all those small simple things up, it's a pimple on an elephant's butt. But in terms of the overall sort of impact, and so universities higher education serving caught in this same sort of thinking, you know, it's, it's like the individual says, I put a solar panel on my roof and have recycle a bit, things look sort of fine. And in the same way that really smart, honest, wonderful people have been drawn into thinking that these measures alone will make a difference, I think many university leaders have as well. So I think there's just this, this focus on on doing your bit through energy efficiency and food and travel and expecting without doing the math that that's, that's gonna be fine.

(17:53):
So that would be one reason I think another though is that the university system as a whole can be fairly conservative and it's sort of understanding of its role in spreading human prosperity. I don't see any deep malevolence there to see, you know, a great deal of momentum around research projects and research agendas that are about increasing efficiencies and increasing production and generating more el economic wealth for everybody because gosh, you know, that has worked for so long and it's really delivered the goods. But, but we are in this dilemma now where perhaps that logic no longer guarantees, certainly human prosperity. I would say another reason is that when we think about measures for prepping society for higher human prosperity and happiness at lower rates of growth, things like reduced work for example, or perhaps cooperatives worker-owned businesses, that that can still generate a profit and generate wonderful products, goods and services, but aren't driven by that corporate logic of having a maximize sort of market share and growth every, every quarter that these initiatives really fall in the gaps.

(18:56):
I mean, what discipline takes that on? You know, would it be economics? Well, most economics programs are, are geared in a much different sort of direction. Political science, well, you know, this, this has got a kind of a hands-on kind of quality that straddles a variety of disciplines. Typically then these concerns may fall to the odd environmental studies or sustainability studies sort of program at universities, which often are fighting for credibility. You know, they're often looked a bit of scans like, like are these programs really radical environmentalists pretending that they're academics? There's a certain degree of, of kind of self-regulation when it comes to the research initiatives that these institutes of sustainability or environment sort of may pursue. It's not that thinking about social innovations that would allow people to live better lives on less. It's not that these social innovations aren't really interesting research topics, but few people coming into academia or it's either trained or rewarded or taking on.

(19:57):
I I, I'll just say one more thing on this. You know, as an older tenured professor mentoring young professors coming up now, you know, the, the pressure these days, especially in the changing pace of higher education where a tenured position or our tenured positions are increasingly scarce and more and more we've got people coming in or working for not a whole lot for just teaching some classes for two or three years and then off they go someplace else that the scramble for more secure employment in many of these universities is, is intense. People feel it. And, and that the way that you sort of secure your space in higher education is to publish in the best journals or publish books for the best publishing houses. And most of these places are keepers of the disciplinary sort of purity of the disciplinary flame. And that means you're, you're very focused building on what's been done. You're not getting too far outta your lane and that really does militate against the kinds of things we've been talking about, the possibilities for higher education to be leading the way.

(20:57):
No, yeah, and that's, I appreciate your insights on that especially about how things are funded and the priorities of most post-secondaries. That really makes a lot of sense. I guess is it how universities are funded when they're connected to industry and industry wants jobs in certain sectors or certain research is prioritized? Does that change the, way that post-secondary operates?

(21:19):
It can really vary from field to field. You know, some fields don't require a great deal of funding for research and test betting, right? You know, I guess if you're setting up a big natural science lab or organic chemistry, you need, you need million dollar pieces of equipment and you've got some issues there. So it's it's a little unclear to me what role the kind of current funding mechanism has on on higher education's approach to sustainability. You know, which, which again is largely the material kind of technology innovation without thinking about about social innovation. What does seem clear to me though is that higher education is facing a funding front in the United States. I don't know how it is in Canada. I suspect it's very much the same as it, you know, we're approaching what's called the demographic cliff. There just aren't that many sort of young people coming into higher education now.

(22:06):
And so you've got a lot of schools that are closing, for example, or thinking about closing on budget crunches. And then you've, you've got some real scramble in the professorate to try to sort of make ends meet, at least in terms of their own workload and then securing sort of long-term employment. So I, I think rather than, than thinking about the funding, which is, it's not to say we shouldn't look at it, but it's just can be just such a mix across a range of disciplines. It's actually to push higher education to rethink or to revisit its claim for why it exists. And I mean, I think back to the, to the US experience, most of the big universities, I should say in in the United States are so-called land grant universities that were created by virtue of legislation that was passed in the 1860s that gave states land that was controlled by the federal government that had been taken of course from the indigenous peoples.

(22:58):
The states then sold and developed these large universities in the mission of sort of improving quality of life at that time of rural American. That got interpreted through the lens of let's innovate, let's build more technologies. That's where the economy, but the primary mission, but high higher education, you know, across North America, in Europe, in Australia, has been to combine education and research for human prosperity. And I think these guys and gals need to be reminded of what human prosperity means. It means acting boldly to think about how we live within the limits of the earth and let's not just live within the limits. Let's live well below the limits cuz the science is so darn uncertain and there's so many tipping points in cascade effects and synergisms that let's not mess around by coming up to the edge And up to now, I mean there's been great, there's been great movement in the whole material sustainability of, you know, decarbonization.

(23:52):
But the, there's been a real lack of imagination sort of moving forward. And I think it's time for all of us as stakeholders in higher education, students, teachers, community members to be asking a set of fundamental questions in respectful but persistent ways of higher education. You know, how are you understanding your, your sustainability mission and how are you thinking about adapting and advancing the kind of living that would allow folks to live unless without being asked to sacrifice, it's the most important research question. And we're not gonna get there by making a solar collector a bit more efficient or developing smaller, more versatile modulars or of nuclear power plants. While both may be important, those technological interventions just aren't gonna make as much of a bang as we might want them if we continue to see just the ever marching upward growth of consumption and production and, and the output of effluence and ecological assaults.

(24:55):
So I, I think there's leverage here cuz the university doesn't understand itself as being shortsighted, narrow-minded, or uninterested in human prosperity. But I think we've allowed higher education around the world to get off a little too easy in its understandings and its claims about sustainability. I mean, let's give credit where credit is due, the great strides. But in the same way that we would say to our neighbors, Hey, it's not enough for you to recycle and put a solar collector on your roof. You need to be thinking about acting as a citizen in your community, in your town, in your province, in your state. For more structural issues. We need to be saying to the university, you need to be thinking more fundamentally about how to research, pioneer, tested, demonstrate, and make palatable a whole set of social innovations, shorter work weeks or collective programs that make it possible for people to, to live better on less alternative forms of business worker-owned enterprises and cooperatives of which we see a proliferation across North America, but still we could see a whole lot more where universities are actually supporting those forms of the businesses in their community now that deliver goods and services and, and community wellbeing without being preoccupied with this growth model.

(26:06):
They can do more, they should do more. We need to help them see the wisdom of doing more.

(26:12):
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, no, it's, it's definitely a very tricky thing to change. I guess for me, like if I'm thinking of a deeper level, when it comes down to it, it seems like if you just talk to any prospective student, right, the first thing they say is, what job am I gonna get after I have this degree? It's connected to how can I be employable? And that could be in various fields, but it's always connected to that. And if we are prioritizing less work and even work as identity really interests me. Thinking about that, you know, what does post-secondary look like if suddenly there are less demand for jobs, we don't need to work as much, our identity isn't tied up as much into our work. How does that change post-secondary?

(26:52):
Well, you, I think in some ways it changes it, I think in some ways that it doesn't. I mean, these aren't new issues. I, if you're ever looking to avoid the work you should be doing, go to a university library if you, if it's one in town, and look for the old sociology textbooks from the 1960s and all of them will have a chapter or two, but oh my god, the biggest social problem of the early 21st century will be people will have too much spare time on their hands. They'll only have two or three days worth of work to do because productivity and technology leads to, we can be more productive on the job. And of course what happened was we're working more than we were then and we've just used all those productivity games to have, you know, a lot of stuff, some of which has made our lives wonderful and some of which, you know, probably owns us more than we own it.

(27:36):
So this whole notion of the university being engaged in these issues is not a new one in the sense it's sociologists in the university. Were thinking about this for a while, but to your question about work, on the one hand, I, I don't think that the whole notion of work and how we identify with will change. I mean, if I'm working three and a half or four days a week, you know rather than five and a half days. And the key here is I've got a little less money in my pocket. So I'm, I'm not gonna be as consumptive, but I still think I'm gonna identify as a college professor, as a writer, right? So in that respect, I don't think that higher education will will change a whole lot. They still might be training young people for jobs or a whole series of jobs as the economy changes and they need to adapt, but that just might not be working in that job as many hours.

(28:21):
So one answer to the question of, you know, both secondary have to change, I, I'd say no, but on the other answer I, another way I'd say, yeah, totally. Cuz I think one of the things that we do know and the Europeans of the EU is, is is all over this in its sort of sustainability planning, trying to get to a low growth, no growth fut. It's this whole notion of consumerism, you know, that we can be both producers and consumers of a product. And you think about community gardens for example, or community-based sort of solar or wind sort of centers. It turns out that when people are engaged in e yi or producing the food or the energy with others in their community that they're consuming, we don't need to be all preachy with people about how they consume less. It turns out like if you're growing your own food, you're generating your own energy with others, there's something about that that just naturally brings out the sense of, I want to be really careful with that.

(29:09):
I don't wanna use a whole lot of that. I need to change my lifestyle, honour the work that's sort of been done in that. And so if we were to imagine higher education, not just training people for formal jobs, but also training them to be engaged in their communities where they can, given the limitations of sight and distance and, and where they live and to a whole host of activities that allow for some degree of decentralized production and consumption of energy, of food, of water, of animal product, of other kinds of production and consumption that we're all a part of, we would probably see more of a shift in consumption patterns and a kind of voluntary, I want to do this, this is awesome than than any kind of state federal legislation, you know, might, might, might impose. So then how does the university help with that?

(29:55):
And there's a great literature that my students and I often read into that, that talk about how things like carpentry or plumbing or the trades, you know, somehow been seen as sort of second class when really, you know, it's creative and it's problem-solving. There has been a long sort of gestating movement in, in secondary education that says that we should be putting students in the way of, of how to raise chickens or how to do carpentry or just basic electrical engineering so they can hook some stuff up at home. We should be doing that as much as we are the kind of book learning. And I think that this future where we may be working less and then there'll be more time for us to be producing more of what we consume in our communities because it's just kind of fun and it might be a way to bring people together, but this might be what the university can, can really begin to cultivate on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

(30:42):
You take your philosophy class with Play-Doh and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you're out in a community garden learning about the ecology of plants and agroecology and planting stuff as well so that you can be prepped to do that in a community where you live later. So it both challenges the notion of what the university is in terms of work, but it also preserves this idea that we are still training people for professions, but professions really may not be as so pressured to work such long hours cuz you know, we know people who work really long hours just consume like crazy.

(31:11):
When you talk about that, I think what I'm thinking about more deeply maybe is the heart of post-secondary, the heart of especially a university, maybe not so much a technical college is the idea of learning and critical thinking. Like that's really the point, right? It's not about what job I'm gonna get, how am I gonna be hireable? And yes, people will want to identify with something, but I, in an ideal world, I think perhaps higher education could just be about learning and critical thinking. And if you want to take a pottery class or a philosophy class or a organic growing garden class, then go for it, right? Right now, you know, you're paying a lot for tuition, right? Some, some students are getting into tens of thousands of dollars of debt. So you can't just be taking classes that are fun and interesting. You really have to have a focus with a job at the end. So that's kind of what I'm thinking of is how would post-secondary change, would it be more about learning for the sake of learning and less about what job am I gonna get at the end of this?

(32:03):
Yeah, that's, I I think, I think that's really well put. I mean, I, you know, I sit in a particular experience that, I mean, I have a limited field of view, so you know, I was an undergrad and grad student at Berkeley. I went off, worked at a small liberal arts college in the US north of Pittsburgh for 20, 25 years, jumped to another one for a little bit and then for the last 10 years I've been at Yale and US here in Singapore. It may, it may not matter a whole lot, at least in these, at these institutions of higher education that emphasize kind of critical thinking, you know, and, and, and typically at least again now back to my limited field of view, they tend to be these smaller institutions that works. The professor is still doing a lot of research, but there is a real focus on mentoring young people and putting 'em in the way of, of experiences in those situations.

(32:47):
The narrative really is we're not training you for a job, we're training you for a lifetime of different employment. And those folks really do seem to go off at least statistically in the aggregate and be pretty nimble Here in Singapore, there's, there's a big focus on, on not training people for a particular profession in Singapore, I just, you know, it's very practical in, in, in, in everything that they do because they say people are gonna be changing jobs eight or nine or 10 times. And so you, you have to train people to be nimble and to be able to, to adapt, which is another thread here in higher education or what can you do in education that helps the student become adaptable and nimble, a lifelong learner sort of over time. But I, and here's, here's now where, where the grumpy part of me comes out.

(33:31):
I do not see how the largest bulk of secondary education, I'm speaking of the US experience now I, I don't know how it's in Canada, but I've seen from US, Australia, Europe, for the most part, western Europe. I do not see how a bulk of that secondary education is really geared towards producing critical things. It can happen, but for my colleagues who sit in a in a major research university, they are not rewarded for good teaching evaluations or innovative curriculum. I mean, they are rewarded. Their, their promotion, their tenure, their, their salary increases are all linked to research productivity and their ability to sort of, I, you know, had, had a dear colleague and the story is about 15 or 20 years old, but I, if anything's just gotten worse, we went to a major university in the US and was nominated for the teaching award in his second year in science technology and society studies.

(34:29):
And he wasn't gonna get it because a whole lot of people were queued up behind him and had been there longer to get the teaching award. This was a highly coveted thing. He's all done, his chair calls him into her office and, and she was and remains a very important figure in the science technology environment, sustainability field. And she said, congratulations on being nominated for the teaching award. You need to find another job. You need to go someplace else. Your listeners can't see the expression on your face now, but it's one of a surprise, right? And she was doing him a favour because what she basically said is if you care enough about teaching, put that much time into a course for freshmen and sophomores trying to open their minds and moving forward this is the wrong place for you because your promotion and tenure is going to be dependent on research.

(35:12):
Which I think is why at the beginning of our conversation, you know, I really wanted to push the research mission of the institution of higher education cuz so much of what I see in my colleagues, many of whom would love to be engaged with undergraduates, but just don't have that time because they're running, they've got graduate students and research programs, they've got grants they need to administer and they've got other grants they've gotta apply for. They just don't have the time to be thinking creatively about how to make really special things happen for undergraduates. And that can be really difficult if you walk into a lecture room and there are 120 people there. How does that happen? So there's a scale effect as well. So so much of higher education does not to me seem to be about creating these kinds of individuals we're talking about.

(35:52):
I think people can get that out of any institution if you really try as a, as an undergraduate, but the incentive structures are geared against it. So I think in these smaller institutions where mentoring undergraduates young people is, is important, then this is a place where we can begin to see real experiments in kind of curricular form. Let's train people for a variety of jobs, let's help 'em think about how to be more civically engaged. Perhaps there's a way of of acquainting them with you know, the nuts and bolts of getting your hands dirty and actually building stuff or doing things because that may be where we are later with prosumer with these larger institutions, those curricular changes don't happen as much, but maybe there are research initiatives that are in test betting that's really trying to sort of show how we get to more community-based worker-owned cooperatives or how we get to shorter work hours with reduced pay, but better quality of life and actually for those larger institutions to put their money where their mouth is to actually make those possibilities happen in the communities or on campus. So I think there's gonna be a differential set of responsibilities there, but man, you gotta move beyond pointing to the solar collector on the gymnasium and saying, look, we we're, you know, we've displaced so many tons of CO2 this year, aren't we great? Because that's, that's a great start, but gotta move beyond the tech.

(37:07):
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And that's a good point about just the incentives within post-secondary, even as a researcher or a professor, it's not necessarily about fostering students for lifelong learning, it's about getting those positions, getting the awards, getting the research grants, doing effective research. So yeah, there's definitely perhaps a big shift that would need to take place. But yeah, I think in some of the things you've been talking about during our conversation, it just seems like o secondary has a lot of power as well, right? Like and, and especially like you mentioned in research specifically, like we can actually test something and, and say this works or do a pilot project or something. So would you say that there's a power in the university to be leaders in that post-growth future?

(37:49):
Definitely. You know, and, and just returning to a component of our earlier conversation, I just fear that too much of the energy has been captured or has been diverted on these tech technological or efficiency gains and there are real opportunities for the university to move in other directions. And you know, I, I spoke just a moment ago about the, the centers for the professor that sort of engaged with students often at these larger institutions. But this is one place in secondary education where you still have a cadre, of men and women who are at the middle and upper points in their, in their careers where they, you know, they have this thing called tenure. I mean, they've got a job for life as long as they don't do anything incredibly stupid or bad.

(38:37):
And there's a real potential there then for just some of those people. You don't need that many people on a university campus to begin to innovate in different directions, perhaps with getting some grant money tested or to, or, or to open up a couple of new courses to begin to think about things or to to pull some graduate and undergraduate students together and launch a new research initiative. We're both cursed and blessed by social media here in 2023. But one of the blessings is that unlike when I first started in, in this, in this business, you can pull together a pretty nifty research project or a class, you can put it out there and suddenly you've got 10 other people sort of at different universities wanting to sort of know more about that. So the networking possibilities are really pronounced. I guess I returned to your question that I, I don't feel like I've answered satisfactory cuz I'm still groping in the dark on this is, you know, why hasn't the university then moved more forcefully?

(39:23):
And it may ultimately be that you know, to talk about reduced economic growth is still kind of like that doesn't really get you invited to parties, you know, I mean people begin to look a bit suspicious at you, you know, as an individual or as an institution, especially if you're this institution that for so long has been charged with facilitating leaner and meaner more powerful, you know, more a higher growing sort of e economies, a more consumption, more production, more prosperity. And so I think one of the things that I'll be working on in the next year is trying to pull together networks of colleagues building off of this, of this piece that you were so kind to read that then kind of went into hibernation in part because of the covid sort of stuff is to think about how do we get conversations going on in strategically located nodes of higher education where we're talking about curriculum and research.

(40:19):
We're not gonna use the deep growth argument. We're gonna say, look, in the rich world we're gonna see at best 2% growth a year. It's probably gonna drop down to 1% growth. I mean these economies are maturing, we're seeing demographics sort of leveling off. We're even contraction. So what can happen in terms of test betting of policy and innovation that for instance at lower growth rates spreads jobs across more people and keeping people employed and happy. Well that just means shorter work loops, you know, but how do you do that in a way that's still gonna sort of, the math is gonna square up and people are gonna have enough to live on without feeling that they're sacrificing. So rather than than make the environmental argument to say that there is a wave of lower economic growth and perhaps in some years almost zero economic growth in the aggregate coming towards us with overall population, probably growth rates leveling off and actually beginning to decline in 30 or 35 years.

(41:11):
So we're looking at this sort of demographic stability and then implosion, well at least contraction. So how, how do we begin to anticipate but a good, wonderful life looks like at low growth and let's, let's make that happen. And then if we get that done, it's, it's so much easier to make the de-growth argument cuz then it doesn't sound like, like we're all just a bunch of crazy people trying to put people back in caves and make them all sort sacrifice. We can already point to a whole set of test betting and policy mechanisms for a future that we know is coming. A low-growth economic future is on our doorstep. E growth isn't that far behind and I think it's just a matter of shaking some people out of some preconceived notions of sustainability and, and, and trying to fire a higher degree of imagination, especially among people whose jobs are guaranteed for life. So come on, let's just get crazy for a year people and if it doesn't work out, you can go back to your old research sort of focus.

(42:06):
Yeah, and I think that that's a good point about tenure for sure is that's something that's very unique to universities and yeah, I think that's so important in that your job is more secure. And from my perspective, I feel like it gives you time to think, right? We've, some of those things have come out in our conversation are just forward thinking, changing ideas about how our society runs. And I think that that just takes time to digest and think about and how do we effectively do that. So, you know, Michael, that makes me think about my last question, of course is this show is about empowering citizens to take action on the climate crisis. And so when it comes to post-secondary and perhaps changing in a, a lower growth future, what can people do

(42:46):
At the risk of making assumptions about the folks who are listening. Now I imagine that, that most of us who are thinking about environmental issues and would be plugged into this great podcast would have some connections with higher education. You know, we might, we might be alums, we might have kids who, who are alums or will soon be, we might have sons or daughters who are thinking about going to a school, right? I mean, or they might have, we might have one in the community. They can be large universities, they can be smaller colleges. It doesn't matter because it's not the scale or the size. It's like it's, it's networking who's doing some interesting stuff. They can communicate it up. But I, I think the thing that we, we can all be doing in ways that are consistent with our own abilities temperament is to be to be asking respectfully but persistently of these units of secondary education about how they're thinking about sustainability for the 21st century.

(43:36):
We are all stakeholders in this institution that takes a lot of taxpayer and private citizen money on the premise that it is doing a whole variety of things for the public good. Let's take them at their word. Let's believe they really think that they're, they're working in the public good and, and I think they really believe more often than not that they are, let's help them expand their perspective. Let's help them sort of see that the next step in sustainability is not building yet another set of solar panels or a wind machine, but they need to be part of a process of thinking about how we get to a world where reduced consumption is not a naughty word, you know, but it's, instead it's something that we can, we, we can see how we get there in ways that will be just and fair and good for our ourselves and, and our community.

(44:23):
I guess long story short, not to make it more complicated than it needs to be is that we all, I think need to get a little bit square in our head about the limits of these consumer-based sort of environmental sort of approaches about living more lightly by changing our, what energy we use or what food we eat or, or what transport we employed. This is important, but it's not enough. If we are coming to realize that it's not enough, then the university should realize it's not enough for them just to stay there. They need to be thinking about more structural forces. They can do it. They've got the resources, they've got the expertise. They just need to push. I think we can, we can engage them respectfully, but persistently.

(45:01):
Great. No, that's very helpful. Overall this has been a very educational conversation, Michael, so thanks so much for coming on the show,

(45:08):
Michael, it's been my pleasure. Best of luck to you and best wishes to all of your listeners out there.

(45:14):
Well, that was my conversation with Michael. Overall, Post-Secondary obviously has an important role to play in our sustainable future, but clearly, it has to get beyond solar modules and wind turbines and get to a deeper foundational change. And I'm optimistic we can make that change happen. Well, that's all for me. I'm Michael Bartz. Here's the feeling a little less in over our heads when it comes to saving the planet. We'll see you again soon. In Over My Head was produced and hosted by Michael Bartz in partnership with Environment Lethbridge Original music by Gabriel Thaine. If you would like to get in touch, email info@inovermyheadpodcast.com.

(45:49):
I'm trying to save the planet, oh will someone please save me?