A Social Critic Warns of Upheavals to Come

Related materials

Article: What Is a Sustainable University?

Article: In Search of the Sustainable Campus

• Map: What a sustainable campus might look like

Colloquy: Talk online with Anthony D. Cortese, a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, on Thursday, October 19, at 2 p.m., U.S. Eastern time.

Article: Truth in Advertising: Middlebury College's Biomass Plant

Article: Truth in Advertising: Furman University's Local Produce

Article: Truth in Advertising: University of Minnesota's Ethanol Fleet

Article: Students Call for Action on Campuses

Article: A Social Critic Warns of Upheavals to Come

Article: A New Science Breaks Down Boundaries

Article: The Intellectual Territory

Article: Saving the Planet, by Degrees

Article: The Corporate Captain Who Aims for 'Zero Footprint'

Article: Support at the Top for Sustainability

Article: Lessons From Animals and Land

• Slide show: Photographs of Warren Wilson College's farm

Opinion: A Meditation on Building

Opinion: Sustainability: the Ultimate Liberal Art

Interactive quiz: How sustainable are you and your campus?

List: A selection of readings about sustainability

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines Higher-Education Price Index Rises 3.6 Percent The measure of colleges' inflation costs grew only slightly more than last year, but it doesn't include recent jumps in some expenses, like utilities. Higher-Ed Bill Slowed by Two Disputes Campus Planners Discuss How to Attain Sustainability Ruling Says Colorado Board Discriminated Against University Universities in Beijing Tighten Security for Olympics U.S. Universities Negotiate Tricky Terrain in the Middle East Newly Found Chameleon Lives Fast, Dies Young Commentary Richard H. Hersh and Richard P. Keeling: On a 'Liberal Education'

By SCOTT CARLSON

James Howard Kunstler, the journalist and social critic, has written books about suburbia that have become standard reading in architecture and urban-planning courses. His latest book, The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), makes dire predictions about America's future in an age of energy shortages, water scarcity, and climate change. Such pressures will cause economic upheavals, leading Americans to reorganize society around community businesses and local agriculture, he contends.

Q. How do you think colleges will fare in what you call "the long emergency"?

A. I would say anything organized at the gigantic scale is going to be in big trouble and is going to falter and fail under the conditions we face — places like the University of Michigan. ... Higher education over the past 30 or 40 years has been regarded as a consumer activity, which implies that it needs a sufficiently affluent customer base to use it. We are moving into a period of not only energy scarcity, but also of greatly reduced incomes and, to some degree, economic desperation. College will return to being an elite activity. We have plenty of grounds to question what higher education has become — preparation for ridiculous careers like public relations and marketing, degrees in artificial specialties and overcooked hothouse academic fields. We are going to be living in an economy that is not going to support this stuff.

Q. Are there things colleges could do, either in infrastructure or pedagogy, to soften the blow?

A. We are going to find ourselves in reduced situations where most of the vocations are hands-on, nonacademically derived kinds of things — particularly in agriculture, because we are going to be in an agricultural crisis that is going to require a heroic reorganization of farming in America if we're going to feed ourselves. ... I can see a situation where academia, or what remains of it, is principally engaged in a curatorial role. It's a severe view. But anybody who thinks that higher education will continue to be a fiesta of frat parties, motoring around giant campuses, and consumer-oriented classwork is going to be very disappointed.

Q. Do you think colleges should focus their energy on how to power buildings and infrastructure?

A. The architecture schools, and especially the most elite architecture schools, have been engaged in everything but an attempt to understand the problems we face. They have been consumed in celebrity worship, and the kind of things they are celebrating are a sort of monumental narcissism that will do nothing for us — the monumental sculptures of Frank Gehry and the exercises in nihilism by Rem Koolhaas. They provide nothing in terms of a meaningful response to the crisis in architecture we face. That crisis can be defined with some precision: We will not have the energy to run gigantic skyscrapers and megastructures, and we will have to return to the materials found in nature. ... The universities are doing nothing to prepare their students for this, in the face of fairly obvious problems.

Q. There has been a renewed interest in sustainability. What do you make of it?

A. The renewed interest in sustainability, as it is presenting itself at the moment, is not much more than a delusion that we can keep the interstate highway system, Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World, and all of the other furnishings of the drive-in utopia running on biodiesel and used french-fry oil. ... What you're seeing generally throughout our culture is an unwillingness to face the reality that we're going to have to do things drastically differently.