Why Do We Need Higher Education? Some Thoughts from David W. Orr

This essay corresponds to the video I just posted.

I am a recently retired biology professor. I have taught for 43 years at colleges and universities in circumstances where teaching was valued more than research. Professoring has been my life.

I became a professor because I wanted to spend my life enjoying the natural world, especially plants, and making new discoveries about it. I wanted to teach, write books, and do research to open people’s eyes about the wonderful green world. I also wanted to get paid enough to make a living while I was doing this.

But why, in general, do we have higher education? Why should students go to college? Professors will always answer this question by saying that we want to prepare students to live in the world. This is true. The fact that it is true does not mean that it is not trite. But what does this mean? State universities must prepare assessment reports in which we present measurements that show that taxpayer money has been well spent. This is reasonable. But what are the measurements? In every assessment with which I have been involved, the measurements have been job placement and income for our graduates.

But this is not the only thing that students need to be prepared to do. They will also have to run the economy and run the world. And the only way to do this is to take care of the natural world. If ecological crisis occurs, there will be no basis for an economy. In other words, all education must be environmental education. There is no subject of study that can be entirely separated from the environment. Below is a photo of a seaside alder, the focus of much of my research and teaching.

This is the message of David W. Orr’s 1994 collection of essays, Earth in Mind. Orr, a retired professor at Oberlin College in Ohio, is one of the nation’s leading environmental educators. He has thought more about environmental education than possibly anyone else. And he believes that higher education is falling so far short of what it needs to do that it is practically worthless except for helping some students get jobs.

Orr describes a number of ways in which American colleges are failing to prepare students for realistic environmental responsibilities. We are teaching classes, he says, as if there is no planetary emergency going on. One of those ways is that we have indoor classes. What could be more boring than for a student to sit inside a room and listen to a professor talk? In my experience, the students may be paying attention, or not; they even have numerous creative ways of pretending to be awake. In every class I have taught, about ten percent (God bless them!) of the students have been attentive and enthusiastic. The solution, says Orr, is to get them outside.

In college, the students almost never have classes outside, unless the classes are field trips, which are necessary to learn to identify plants and animals. But otherwise it is just PowerPoints. I can tell you it wasn’t chalkboards or PowerPoints that got me interested in science. It was being out in the forest, and even in artificial landscapes such as orange orchards, that made me want to learn science. In Oklahoma, most class days are too hot, or too windy, or too rainy to be outside. But I found excuses to get students outside whenever I could. When I taught evolution, I took the students to a sidewalk outside, which I had marked off with important dates in the evolutionary history of the Earth. We walked along and discovered that most of Earth history has been bacteria. I had the students shout over and over, Bacteria! Finally, in the last few meters, we experienced the life of complex organisms. Human civilization was a little coat of paint on a metal bar at the end of the sidewalk. But even if it was just the last couple minutes of class, I would get them outside, on a sunny patio, to act out the events of mitosis. I know no other professors who did anything like this.

There are very few colleges that have an environmentally realistic curriculum. I tried to encourage this kind of curriculum where I worked. Only a few other faculty were interested. Whether it was because they were not interested or because they were overwhelmed with other responsibilities, I cannot say. (Randy, if you are reading this, thanks for being one of the visionaries along with me.)

Environmental education does not get much help from textbooks. There are environmental science textbooks, and there are general biology textbooks. I tried to write a general bio text with an environmental foundation. It never went into production, mainly because professors only wanted the same old format in which students were expected to learn the science of biology without thinking about how it related to their lives, and certainly without appealing to their sense of wonder.

Orr also discussed the construction of our buildings. Like any other building, an academic building can be constructed to recycle its own water, or to generate more energy than it consumes. In this way, we could visibly demonstrate to students that we fit in with the processes of the Earth. Maybe they would go on to encourage companies or institutions for which they work to build in an environmentally conscious way. But this seldom happens. My experience is typical. Our university was building a new classroom building. Here was the perfect opportunity to incorporate a green roof. A green roof will almost always pay for itself over the long term. The administration turned down my request, however. They said that it would be too expensive in the short term, while they were doing the bond issue.

David Orr had no more success than I did. During a 1999 talk I heard him describe the library at Oberlin, which had a single light switch: all the lights were on, or all were off. This is the worst possible arrangement for energy conservation. Oberlin is a leading liberal arts college, sometimes called The Harvard of the West. A leading college, and a leading environmental educator, could not solve this problem.

Orr also talked about tenure. He was for it, of course, as almost all professors are. That is, if it does what it is supposed to do. It is supposed to let professors explore new ideas that might or might not turn out to be useful, without fear of reprisal. But for too many professors, tenure becomes an excuse to be lazy. I used my tenure and sabbatical as a chance to try things, such as my too-different kind of textbook and my new curriculum. Orr speculates, would Rachel Carson have gotten tenure? Not if corporations threatened to withhold donations to her university!

I believe that our colleges and universities are incentivized to produce, not graduates who will lead the world into a better state, but consumers and business leaders who will get people to consume more and more of what will harm them and the Earth.