My new book project begins: Universities on Fire

I’ve just signed a contract with Johns Hopkins University Press for my next book.  The complete manuscript of Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Age of Climate Crisis is due in late 2021, aimed at a 2022 publication.

The title should give you a sense of the project, as will my blog posts on the topic.  Here’s a short description:

Universities on Fire explores the future of higher education during an age of unfolding climate crisis. Current studies have traced the likely implications of anthropogenic climate change across a range of domains, from agriculture to policy, urban design, technology, culture, and human psychology.  However, few have explored how climate change can reshape colleges and universities.  Universities on Fire addresses this by connecting climate research to a deep, futures-informed analysis of academia.  It starts with a small focus, a given campus, then gradually expands its view to the level of how academia as a whole interacts with civilization’s broadest movements.  

Here’s the proposed table of contents:

1. The heat is on. A quick summary of what we understand about climate change means, and the scope of this book: to the year 2100, all of global higher education. A note on method: horizon scanning and trend analysis, relying on simulations and scenarios.  A sketch of campuses as institutions in the midst of great what: which populations will engage in what ways with climate change?  The theme: climate change will literally reshape many institutions.
2. Uprooting the campus. Colleges and universities rethink their physical plant.  Campus buildings and grounds will be rethought, revamped, and possibly replaced in the pursuit of carbon neutrality, mitigation, and adaptation, at times responding to immediate physical changes to their environment.   On-site transportation, the academic calendar, campus power generation, food, sanitation, financing, and off-site travel are up for transformation.  Campus IT and inequities among academic populations receive special attention.  Ultimately some campuses will choose to relocate away from endangered sites, leading to a potential Great Academic Migration.
3. Doing research in the Anthropocene. Each academic discipline faces the possibility of great change in this period in response to climate-related demands both from within their professional population and from the broader world.  We consider individual fields within the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts.  Some are likely to grow, such as environmental studies, climate science, computer science, agriculture, civil engineering, and meteorology.  Others may drop away or transmute into something very different, like petroleum engineering.  Still others may see their subjects change as the crisis unfolds, such as allied health care, law, museum studies (how to preserve or document endangered sites?), economics, or political science. Each may extend themselves transdisciplinarily to grapple with climate change, and new interdisciplinary fields will appear.
4. Teaching to the end of the world. The structure of education is likely to shift as the world becomes more uncertain.  A 60-year curriculum now means considering teaching how to survive or address civilizational crises.  Collaborative teaching across campuses can power new concentrations.   Student life, internships, and career planning have to  be reconsidered.  Faculty may adjust their pedagogies accordingly – a shift to more project-based learning, for example, with an emphasis on climate topics.
5. Town, gown, deserts, and rising sea levels. Colleges and universities are embedded in local communities whose political pressures, social structure, and material conditions will change as the Anthropocene progresses.  Town-gown relations may become more fraught with political clashes between the two, new regulations (either from climate change mitigators or deniers), and climate gentrification.  Are new connections between post-secondary and secondary schooling possible?
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     How should campuses respond to locally-arrived climate and climate-driven refugees?  When should institutions contribute materially or intellectually to local climate change efforts, such as building seawalls?

6. Academia versus the world. Campuses are also subject to an extent to national policies and political movements.  How should academia respond when a nation or society mandates carbon neutrality, adopts a circular or degrowth economy, advances a reduction in births?  How does a campus conduct digital work if broader networks degrade, or if policies compel a retreat from carbon-intensive technology?  To what extent can academics serve as public intellectuals to shape these debates? Should we participate in projects like the doomsday seed vault or offer campuses as climate sanctuaries? Should academics organize globally to help mitigate or adapt to climate change?  Can academia take a leading role on the world stage?
7. Worst case scenario. How does academia fare in more dire climate conditions than those assumed in the preceding chapters, such as those driven by sudden ice sheet collapse, the release of large amounts of clathrate methane, the trans-Atlantic thermohaline circulation ceasing, the Amazon rainforest reverting to savannah, or temperatures rising 3-5 degrees by 2100 or sooner?  How does the campus physical plant, its research and teaching missions, town-gown relations, and campus-world connects change in ways other than those we have explored thus far, especially when pressures are even more intense and the situation more chaotic?
8. What is to be done? We assess practical responses and strategies for the present by surveying contemporary programs and strategies from around the world, starting by acknowledging the vast amount of academic climate research and the growing amount of climate classwork.  Study groups, teach-ins, and political groups are organizations with ample precedent. Professional development opportunities for staff and faculty exist. There are campus leadership commitments and alliances. A rising number of students, faculty, and staff will seek to take steps for their institutions.  All campus and academia-adjacent populations can play a role.

A note about timing:  I pitched this book over winter, when the Wuhan infections were just starting to get attention.

It may seem counterintuitive to address climate change when COVID-19 is such a dire and present threat.  I do not discount the pandemic in the slightest.  However, the climate change threat is also present and far more deeply embedded in planetary systems.  It will continue to build during and after the pandemic wreaks havoc on civilization.  COVID-19 will strain social and academic resources, weakening them as we turn to address climate change.  Yet if we respond thoughtfully to the virus, we may be better positioned to guide academia through the Anthropocene.  We may develop more effective collective action mechanisms, a greater appreciation for science, and a stronger sense of higher education’s role within the larger world.

At the same time academia faces other challenges, including those outlined in the author’s previous JHUP book: financial sustainability, declining state and public support, the adjunctification of the professoriate, enrollment issues (both overall as well as for specific programs).  For reasons of space Universities on Fire cannot devote a full treatment to each of those, and we should defer readers to Academia Next.  The new volume will, however, place academia’s responses to climate change within that broader and active context throughout.

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Two more notes:

This is my second book with Johns Hopkins.  In late 2017 they signed me up to write Academia Next.  They were and are terrific to work with. I’m delighted they let me back in the house for another round.

And I’d like to make the writing of this one as public and social as I can.

  As with Academia Next I hope to try out arguments, ideas, and visuals with audiences along the way.  I’ll keep blogging on the topic as my research and writing proceed.  I do plan on inflicting the work on my long-suffering Georgetown students and colleagues.  And I have some creative ideas for doing this work in the open, including gaming and some various technologies.

Thank you, my readers, for your engagement on this topic, the largest one I have ever tackled.  I would love to hear from you about points you’d like me to address, research I especially need to heed, and ways of doing this work in public.

There’s much more to come.  I am very excited to get writing!

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