Austin Williams
reprinted from Academic Questions, Springer Link, February 2010; DOI 10.1007/s12129-009-9146-2
For full free access to the journal, please visit: Academic Questions
This essay explores the ubiquity of the sustainability agenda in higher education in the United Kingdom (with some parallel examples from the United States) with a view to pointing out its corrosive influence on educational ambition. In so doing, I suggest that the prevalence of sustainability within education has only been possible because academia has lowered its own critical faculties and allowed academic institutions to be colonized by social policy objectives to the detriment of knowledge for its own sake. Fundamentally, I want to explore the effects of today’s doctrinaire approach to education, which, as far as I am concerned, has resulted in the degradation of students’ expectations, the abrogation of responsibility by those in erstwhile academic authority, and the failure—or refusal—of the academy to defend education in its own terms.
NOTE: This article is reproduced with the kind premission of Academic Questions, Springer Link. Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution. Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
To comment on this article, please write to futurecitiesproject@gmail.com
Click here to return to Comments main page
