by Mary E. Clark

For an increasing number of concerned academics, American universities are slumbering giants ­­ full of potential, but snoring in the presence of obvious crises­in­the­making.

Academic thinking is now so fragmented into disciplines that its efforts are akin to those of the Seven Dwarfs, who daily descended into the diamond mines to wrest a living underground. Like the dwarfs, each discipline has its own tunnel, wherein its most brilliant exponents chip away at the "cutting­edge" with state­of­the­art technologies to extract precious new knowledge that will assist the rest of us hapless humans in coping with our burgeoning problems.

The difficulty is that no one has an overall map of the mine. No one coordinates the multiple tunnels. No one notices that the economists' tunnel of "economic growth" is about to collide with the physicists' tunnel that contains the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (The latter tells us we can never regenerate a polluted stream, a rain forest, or a devastated culture with less energy and effort than it took to degrade it.)

We thus suffer from a surfeit of specialized "knowledge" and a dearth of wisdom and vision. It was E. F. Schumacher, that wise sage, who warned us against relying on disciplinary "experts" because they are programmed to know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing. Beware the "cutting­edge" expert!

Indeed, our problem today is too many specialized experts and a deficiency of elders ­­ of visionaries and prophets, able to pose the most meaningful questions: "What do we mean by progress? What is an 'economy' for? Indeed, what are universities for?" These elders are missing not only from our universities, but from our public dialogue. Were they present, they would draw our attention to critical trends and to solutions more rooted in deeply ecological wisdom than in narrow expertise.

The impacts of the rapid growth in population, consumption, technology, and mobility occur in two domains: the natural environment and the social environment. Both suffer, and contrary to popular perception, the damage done to our social environment is just as great as that done to our natural environment.

The Fundamental Challenge

We are all familiar with the widespread pollution of air, land, freshwater, and oceans by toxic substances, from organic chemicals to heavy metals and pesticides. These have caused problems as diverse as cancer, air and water contamination, acid rain, ozone­layer depletion, and global climate change. (It is hard to argue that over 500 heat­caused deaths in less than one week in Chicago is a "normal" occurrence.)

It is more difficult to catalog the impacts of the technological and institutional changes of the past century on our social well­being. Perhaps most important, after the sheer increase in our numbers, has been the hierarchical organization of almost all aspects of society. First of all, there has been an enormous centralization of political and economic power, which is now global in scope. This process, initiated by the industrial North, is being exported to developing countries. The process has also been accompanied by the exploitation of ordinary, pre­market human relations, as well as the environment, in order to make the economy grow. The result has been a loss of social integrity coupled with alienation of societies and increases in Gross National Product.

As Daly and Cobb have ably shown, much of the recent growth in GNP is spurious, i.e., no real improvement in wellbeing is actually occurring. Instead, some of the growth is due to the costs of repairing environmental catastrophes. If we had paid back all environmental damage, there would have been no growth; and if we subtracted as "costs" (rather than added as "benefits") the growth in social services needed to patch up a disintegrating society, our economic well­being would be seen to have declined from what it was in l95~half a century ago!

Our psychic well­being has also declined, with the commoditization of the once informal, community­based services of caring for each other. As people switched from being loved and loving neighbors to being "clients" serviced by paid "experts," control over our social relations moved from the neighborhood to a bureaucratic welfare system. The resulting psychic alienation has resulted in growing crime among youth and a rise in the retributive power of society. Meantime, there is growing disparity between rich and poor, both within countries and between the rich North and the poor South. This trend affects both social relations and the physical health of the whole society.

Reactions to this increasing loss of personal control over the cultural changes we are being asked to adapt to are multiple. There are massive migrations, often across national borders-from poor, rural, and unstable places to rich, urban places, which in turn are made less stable. Another response to helplessness and loss of local connectedness and identity is the rise of nationalism and religious fundamentalism, which results in more and more incidents of ethnic and religious conflict.

These trends are real, and they are interrelated. Yet the connections are largely missed in our public dialogues because the "experts" who interpret the world for us still wear the blinders of their narrow specialties. Each treats a symptom, which is simply a superficial manifestation of a systemic problem. The problem before educators, then, might be posed as follows: What is the task of universities today? How do we put all this together for students? What sort of research should we be conducting? What philosophizing should we be undertaking? What alternatives are there to explore with our students? In what sorts of social settings do people thrive best? What are the values and institutions most likely to produce justice and sustainability? It is critical that academic leaders, faculty, students, and the public demand academic answers to these basic questions that are wise as well as expert.