Ray Anderson's "Call for Systemic Change"

Dear Colleagues Across the Curriculum

Write First, Think Later

I have entitled this speech:
“A Call for Systemic Change.”
That’s what I am presumptuous
enough to call on you to create
in education. I do not ask you
to do anything I am not trying
to do in industry. Unless
somebody leads, nobody will.
Why not you?" Ray Anderson
(this year's graduation speaker)

MacGregor Smith, our National Endowment
For The Humanities Evaluator in the 70’s, fell
in love with us and would come by from time
to time to pour b b’s onto a desk from a 2 liter
coke bottle:

Hear that? The sound of how many bombs
dropped since WWI.

His message: learn a new way of thinking.
Universe is shifting control into our hands.
We’re flying space ship earth now, not
just a passenger.

Before the wall came down & war was still cold,
concerns of nuclear annihilation & the sky is falling,
sky is falling.

A new way of thinking for Mac:
Hosannah: salvation of the world. .

Couldn’t pin him on the nature of The New Way.
Shift of priorities? (Stop thinking about THAT:
think THIS.) Morals and Ethics courses in
schools of business?

Dean Holt got us to vote us nuclear free and urged
we call ourselves a PEACE College which was when
our Peace Studies program started.

A CONTENT concern.
Not the same as PROCESS

A new way of thinking: Meta hodus.. A systemic
(as well as systematic) change in educating, as Ray
Anderson urges

Get them ready for a different future. Paradigms
are shifting. The folly of the prevailing paradigm,
represented by the “modern” industrial system,
stands exposed in all its errors. A new paradigm
is taking hold: waste-free, renewable, cyclical,
resource efficient, benign, socially equitable,
in harmony with nature.

Get it into your curricula, pedagogy, research,
operations, and supply chains now. There is no
time left for pondering, much less denial.

Graduation-Speak: like hearing Parker Palmer at
Faculty Retreat urging courage to teach & let your
life speak: warms the cockles of hearts like walking
home from a good sermon Sunday morning
Fred Ohler used to preach so as to make
me want to be a better man..

Transformative.

A systemic change in educating.
Process not content. A new way
of thinking about ways of thinking
about polar bears and light bulbs
and global warning and General
Motors and ecological footsteps
and plundering earth and higher
educating. Lower too.
..
Our universities, however, continue
to teach and operate in the system
that is destroying the biosphere.
Adherence to the old mind-set, the
old curricula, obsolete pedagogy, and
shortsighted planning are producing
graduates who are trained to perpetuate
the destruction of the biosphere.

Business, upon which so much depends,
will never “get it” with graduates
like these entering the work force.

What do you think about new ways of thinking?
Systemic change? Transformative educating.
A go-to-the-library or google it up issue?
Task force? Forum item? Worth putting in play?

Punch reply-to-all & we might could sustain
some argument across-the-curriculum along
with our auctions and advising and various
evaluation and assessmental housekeeping
concerns

xxxooo, Sam