Time for climate change on college campuses

We face societal and economic change at every level in the United States. Giants of heavy industry, retail trade, communications and the service sectors are streamlining, retooling and reinventing themselves. The sharply reduced circumstances in which we find ourselves are so dramatic as to justify the label of climate change, as opposed to a passing storm.

Historically, watershed moments such as this have pushed universities to restructure everything from basic research to how and where our undergraduates live. This time, rather than being reactive, we should pause to ask careful questions about how best to move toward a transformation of our own choosing.

The GI Bill, one such watershed opportunity for universities, was passed when the return of American soldiers from World War II threatened to boost unemployment and plunge the economy back into depression. It helped to stimulate an era of growth on American campuses, providing the fuel for the economic expansion of the 1950s through training engineers, scientists and business leaders.

The postwar years also witnessed the acceleration of federal commitment to research through the collaborative efforts of the government, private industry and research scientists. There is no doubt that our collective response has had long-term benefit to the nation. Yet our response was also reactive and, without our anticipating it, fundamentally altered the mission of higher education.

For instance, it was not until 15 years after the National Science Foundation was created that the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities were launched in 1965. Even then, the latter had nowhere near the resources of their science and health counterparts — leading to a perception that the arts and humanities intrinsically had less value. This distortion took root in our universities. The question remains whether it reflects the values of society at large or, conversely, whether it might have contributed to our current state of affairs.

This time, our investment should include commitments that will return us to the transporting promise of the liberal arts — freeing all of us, teachers and learners alike, from the limitations of our self-centered perspectives; enabling us to understand the world from others’ viewpoints; and empowering us to be agents of societal change. We must affirm that education is as much about insight as it is about gaining information or job training; it is about the duty to listen as well as the responsibility to speak out, about the pursuit of wisdom as well as knowledge. We should understand that the study and practice of ethics must find a home in our graduate schools of business and medicine just as it does in our liberal arts colleges.

If not on a college campus, where else in modern society can such emotionally fraught and self-critical examinations take place? It seems to me this is the indispensable duty of our universities and one that must flourish if our free and open society is to survive.

American universities should resist the notion that the economic climate today leaves us unable to influence our own destiny. We should become institutions that engage in what our community’s vision statement at Emory has dubbed “courageous inquiry.” In a global economy where one country’s collapse endangers others; in a global incubator where an animal virus can mutate to humans and prompt fear of a pandemic; in a global ecology where delayed responses to changes harbor the potential for planetary disaster; and on an international stage where nuclear warfare remains a threat, universities must offer a venue for robust, fearless debate and scholarship.

This is the climate change we need, in a time of crisis we cannot afford to waste.

James Wagner is president of Emory University.