Higher Education must Refocus on Relevance and Resonance to Students' Climate Futures
TRANSCRIPT FROM 2021 UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI OFFICE OF SUSTAINABILITY ANNUAL REPORT TO THE BOARD OF REGENTS
Thank you so much. UH Executive Policy 4.202 is the mandate which guides our office, and it does direct us to integrate sustainability across the functions of the university including: operations, curriculum, research, engagement, and cultural connections.
I am joining you from Kaimuki today, where on a clear day, I can see right across Molokai channel to Hawaiʻi Island. Today I can’t even see the shoreline.(Note: a very rainy low-pressure weather system was moving through the islands at this time.)
I also want to acknowledge that generations of Native Hawaiians have shaped Hawaiʻi in ways that are so far beyond sustainable, that has allowed us all to live in Hawaiʻi today. For this I’m grateful, and I’ve dedicated my personal time and resources to working in solidarity with Native Hawaiians today to repair, restore, and regenerate the damages that the dominant global paradigm of extractive economic systems has wrought upon our planetary life support systems.
As I did in 2019, I’m going to ground us today by centering this presentation around a student voice:
TRANSCRIPT:
Graduating today feeling really accomplished and feeling deep gratitude for the opportunity of a lifetime. I’m thankful for my families and the support back in Costa Rica. And I’m also thankful for the UH community who taught me to see past what is invisible to the naked eye.
I arrived to Hawaiʻi almost four years ago, with many burning desires of what I could become and do as an engineer, until I understood that the necessary alignment starts at an individual level, by aligning myself with the community surrounding me.
Community is everything, and as engineers an almost intuitive comprehension of the local and global challenges of our time is so essential, and is inherently accessible by being a member of the community.
UH has a grassroots army that a lot of students and faculty are not even aware of — these individuals are constantly working relentlessly behind the scenes to build the vital and truly interdisciplinary connections that the UH institution unfortunately locks.
So thank you Matt Lynch from the Office of Sustainability, Philip Johnson for keeping the (UH Mānoa) Sustainability Council meetings alive; Makena from the (UH Mānoa) Institute of Sustainability & Resilience; to Kamuela Enos from the (UH System) Office of Indigenous Innovation to source department for the great contributions towards sustainability; Ulla and Kat from the Access Engagement Team, Jeff and the MOP team, Hiapo from the loʻi patch, Lelemia from the CEE department. Lori Ideta as the Interim Vice Chancellor for Students; The Energy House up in upper campus, and all the immensely dedicated sustainability based clubs that students led - the Student Sustainability Coalition folks, and the ASUH.
So I graduate today, certainly feeling excitement. However, I graduate today feeling on unshakeable concern as well. As a civil engineer, I fear of jeopardizing our future collective means by how we’re serving them currently. A large moral dilemma arises as professionals for us. Graduating students, weʻre faced with an important challenge of truly grasping the radical changes that our society and environment will undergo - the complex changes, these irreversible changes.
This is only the very fate of our engineering careers. It impacts all of our civil work in numerous dimensions. If our first and foremost objective as a civil engineer is to protect the safety and welfare of our public through the work we do, then I think we seriously must strategize on how to do it in these presently rapid changing times.
Our very existence, the infrastructure we have built — that’s becoming exponentially vulnerable — our vital resources such as water, and the intricat,e and once magnificent systems that we have built a supply these resources are all the very cusp of depletion. The necessary systematic changes to be implemented for our careers cannot just be technological, they must be behavioral. They must be holistic and interdisciplinary.
So today I graduate with a significant level of concern for us students. I feel that we, UH Civil Engineering Students are lacking preparation to lead our society to truly resilient and regenerative features. It is concerning that our higher education institution remains short on stressing and teaching about the issues that are relevant to our times; specifically our generation's times.
For example, the immense lack of climate change urgency addressed by our department, despite students concerns - it still does not seem to cease to amaze me. An online surveys administered by the Mānoa Institutional Research Office and the Office of Sustainability reported from over 8000 narrative responses that 51(%) of the engineering responding students are very concerned about climate change.
However, we simply did not have enough opportunities to explore it, and integrate more into our engineering formation.
Today, I urge you all, graduates, to apply the engineering tools that we have been given by our CE department and staff; and merge them with the traditional knowledge that lives within our communities, and take that to all our walks of life. We’re in need of an evolutionary state of mind and spirit.
We need to become those engineers that our world and our communities need instead of settling for the normal.
It is no coincidence, we graduate today, in a very unusual way. Therefore we must learn to walk these unusual ways.
Continue questioning what is normal, and strive for those greater changes towards resiliency.
Thank you.
So Covid is not the only challenge that our students and that indeed WE face together today. On December 2, 2020 UN Secretary General Antonio Gueterres' “State of the Planet” speech, opened with the following quote.
“Dear friends, humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal. Nature always strikes back, and it is already doing so with growing force.”
As you may recall a key message I left you with the last time I addressed you was that “Higher education must teach to the issues of our times to remain relevant”, and since it has been two years since I was last here I will share a link to the transcript of that address with you here in the Chat.
The you UH Mānoa Earth Day Survey that Domi refers to was updated in 2020, and those results indicate that:
✔️ 55% of students have increased their levels of concern about climate change, sustainability and related issues, due to Covid.
✔️ 51% of the entire UH Mānoa community (includes students, faculty and staff) have indicated increases in their levels of concern about climate change, sustainability and related issues, due to Covid.
✔️ 96% of undergraduate students are worried about sustainability and climate change issues, which is a clear indicator that we need to do more, as Domi brings to our attention.
The very times that we live in call upon us to turn ALL of our resources towards equipping our communities and our students to navigating uncertain futures ahead.
This here is an update from the graphic that I shared in 2019 from the results of the 2018 Earth Day survey results; this is from the executive summary of the 2020 Earth Day summary:
And my question to all of us, is: What are the implications of this level of student dissonance to our fundamental business model of higher education?
It’s interesting that the highest levels of concerns are in the Ocean and Earth Sciences; and in our professional schools, the levels of concerns reported are markedly lower. We wonder, what that is an indication of?
This complex graphic illustrates the systemwide intervention that our office has been coordinating over the past four years now, to address ecological grief and climate education gaps that were identified in the two year student focus group study, which I reported out on the last time I presented to this group.
We’ve come to call that study the Worry & Hope Study, and it indicated that students experience feeling emotions of anger, sadness, shame and fear about rates of two to one to hope and studies also been acknowledged globally by the Rachel Carson center in Munich, by the Harvard Executive Education for Sustainability Leadership program, and more. (Note: Publication of the study is forthcoming in the Journal of Community Engaged Scholarship.)
One of the things that the study revealed, is that assuming that higher education value proposition of earning a college degree equals getting a good job is a dangerous assumption. Students today are graduating saddled with debt and entering into one of the worst and most protracted economic recessions we’ve ever faced.
Faculty are the front lines of our organization and must be equipped to deal with the emotional complexity that students carry before we even teach something… and as well they must grapple with the complexity of teaching to the issues of our times. Our faculty are doing an incredible job in doing this -with minimal institutional support.
And in the chat here I'm going to share a link to field notes from the faculty study that our office has been coordinating over the past year or so to better understand faculty's context - I share this so that you can read the stories of the challenges that our faculty face, and also so that you can learn and hear from our frontlines - and read about the innovation and resilience, they bring to bear each day: https://medium.com/field-notes-teaching-climate-change-in-higher
We’ve learned through our faculty study that we can do much more to support our frontline workers to equip them to equip students with an education relevant to the climate features that they will inherit.
We’d be well served to meet students where they are at, to equip students with the knowledge, skills and experiences to face uncertain climate futures.
In addition to critical thinking skills students need a sustainability focused education, where they are equipped with systems thinking, strategic thinking, futures thinking, values thinking and collaborative competencies; collectively known as Key Competencies in Sustainability.
So, we have moved from merely counting sustainability related and sustainability focus courses in 2016, to current-day where there are literally hundreds of Sustainability-Related and Sustainability-Focused courses across our campuses.
We’ve moved from a grassroots faculty movement with minimal coherence to system coherence that has been created with the rigorous faculty driven process, supported institutionally with the SF and SUST course-descriptor codes.
And now: 10x Sustainability-Related certificates; 4x Sustainability-Related undergraduate degree programs; 2x Sustainability-Focused undergraduate degree programs; and countless Sustainability-Related graduate and postgraduate degree programs.
On the left hand side (of the graphic below) are your curricular highlights and performance highlights, and on the right hand side is a high level overview of the operational performance highlights:
We’ve seen the increase in solar PV that’s being installed due to the great work of UH Community Colleges, and overall we’ve seen about 158% increase in Solar PV, and at UH Mānoa that increase since establishing the Office of Energy Management has been 585%.
Hundreds of students have been engaged with waste audits across six campuses, and they have collectively weighed over 4,400 pounds of waste to sort through our waste stream and understand what policy interventions, they might be able to recommend. Students are really utilizing and embracing our campuses as a living laboratories for them to apply the lessons that they’re learning in their classrooms and solve real world challenges.
A major initiative of the Office of Sustainability, over the last couple years has been the pilot of a Campus as a Living Lab approach, which can support the integration of sustainability across curriculum and is a well-established best practice across higher education.
I won’t insult you by reading this slide line by line, though I will point to the headlines of Relevance, Resonance and Retention, and I’ll just pause there to note that universities which have really embraced and resourced this Campus as a Living Lab approach, have experienced significant increases in their first year retention rates: ASU being an obvious highlight and UCI is another one.
There are many others; if you Google that term, you’ll see many examples of living lab approaches across higher education.
And I'll also say, in an environment of declining resources where we are being asked to do more and more with less and less, the opportunity to Realign and Revitalize, and to be able to connect existing initiatives and bright spots that exists all across of our campuses, is a very, very compelling opportunity before us.
We have a 40-minute presentation that our Campus as a Living Lab Coordinator (whose position we no longer have, by the way), gave towards the end of last year that I’ve shared the link in the chat below:
This next slide is an experiment in imagining a possible future for the University of Hawaiʻi; an experiment in imagining a possible vision for the University of Hawaiʻi, and this possible future vision is grounded in bright spots that already exist across our campuses:
Today, we already return about $5 for every $1 that is invested in the university (according to this 2013 UHERO study). The university is uniquely poised to be a catalyst for green economic transformation by supporting integration of sustainability across curriculum as outlined in our own executive policy.
A Green Economic Transformation is far more than a narrow view of green jobs in renewable energy, conservation and resilience planning.
A Green Economic Transformation means delivering education that is Relevant and Resonant to our students' context.
A Green Economic Transformation means that our MBAs graduating from our business school need to be ecologically literate, so that they can utilize the tools and skills that they learn and earn towards solving these complex challenges, rather than continue to uphold the extractive economic systems which have brought our planet to the brink.
Can you imagine if we fully embraced our potential and turned all of our resources towards equipping our students and our communities, not only to navigate uncertain futures ahead, but to lead globally on solutions to the challenges we face:
“Come learn at UH about place based approaches to being in reciprocal, sustainable and abundant relationships with other people and our Mother Earth.”
In closing, I want to remind us of the student voice we heard from in 2019 - Rebecca Tang, who was then a recent graduate of Kapiʻolani Community College’s recently established Sustainability Minor-equivalent (Academic Subject Certificate) that is now available to earn in the first year of a student’s college experience at 5x UH Community college campuses:
Rebecca invited us to contemplate the possibilities of the UH system:
“Let UH System be the college that graduates students who save the world.”
In conclusion, all we need to do to live into our enormous potential to lead globally on sustainability education is to focus on how we’re equipping students to face uncertain features - not just getting jobs. It’s a shift in focus to relevance and resonance, which will improve recruitment, retention and graduation numbers.
We need to focus on supporting our faculty.
I failed to note earlier in the presentation that our office's capacity to support that system wide coordination of sustainability across curriculum has recently been de-funded — and that inhibits our ability to support the kind of Professional Development that we need that our faculty need to be equipped to best serve our students.
Additionally, a critical leverage point that we uncovered is looking at tenure and promotion incentives. If we can align those to encourage inter, cross and trans-disciplinary collaboration we will be well-positioned to unleash the full potential of our knowledge enterprise. We need to invest in our capacity to coordinate and support these incredible efforts.
Third, we need to integrate sustainability into our governance, we need to talk about this more than once every two years — if this is important to us. We need to think about what other subcommittees may need to be having these discussions, we need to think about how this integrates with our Mission, Vision, and Purpose.
And finally, we need to consider how to integrate sustainability across management, all the VPs but especially the Vice President for Academic Planning must support and advocate for this initiative and approach.
How can the university turn all of its resources towards creating transformative education for life in harmony with nature? How can we become a driver and a catalyst for the green economic transformation that our state needs so much?
We are well positioned to be a catalyst and the driver for that green economic transformation here in Hawaii, and the world, but only if we decide to make the strategic investments necessary for us to live into our full potential.
Thank you.
Matthew Kamakani Lynch
Director of Sustainability Initiatives, University of Hawaiʻi
Feb 3, 2021
