How might the climate crisis impact universities and colleges?  How might academia respond?  In this presentation we begin by exploring the many dimensions of those questions. We explore the intersection of global warming and the physical plant of a campus, before examining how academic research can address the unfolding crisis.  We next discuss how higher education can best teach the rising generation to prepare them for the new world. For both teaching and research we assess questions of resource preservation, supporting faculty and staff, and honoring student experience.

 

Next, we navigate the complex terrain of how academics can engage the world of the Anthropocene, starting with local communities before branching out to larger possibilities for public scholarship, activism, and collaboration.  We conclude by taking these questions farther into the future, when Generation Z becomes professors and administrators, then senior leaders of the post-secondary sector.  How can we best act now in order to prepare universities for those upcoming decades?

 

Speaker(s)

Bryan Alexander

 

French Simultaneous Interpretation - Audio