Wallerstein on the University

This short post by Immanuel Wallerstein looks at the history of the University in market economies. As members of an academic institution, it's important for us to reflect on its role in the world and the forces that shape the University. Furthermore, Wallerstein connects the University with it's role in facilitating a 'transition' to a less chaotic world system.

". . . the universities were supposed to play the role of one major locus (not of course the only one) of analysis of the realities of our world-system. It is such analyses that may make possible the successful navigation of the chaotic transition towards a new, and hopefully better, world order. At the moment, the turmoil within the universities seems no easier to resolve than the turmoil in the world-economy. And even less attention is being paid to it."

Higher education under attack

by Immanuel Wallerstein

For a very long time there were only a few universities in the world. The total student body in these institutions was very small. This small group of students was drawn largely from the upper classes. Attending the university conferred great prestige and reflected great privilege.

This picture began to change radically after 1945. The number of universities began to expand considerably, and the percentage of persons in the age range that attended universities began to expand. Furthermore, this was not merely a question of expansion in those countries that had already had universities of note. University education was launched in a large number of countries that had few or no university institutions before 1945. Higher education became worldwide.

The pressure for expansion came from above and below. From above, governments felt an important need for more university graduates to ensure their capacity to compete in the more complex technologies that were required in the exploding expansion of the world-economy. And from below, large numbers of the middle strata and even of the lower strata of the world's populations were insistent that they have access to higher education in order to improve considerably their economic and social prospects.

The expansion of the universities, which was remarkable in size, was made possible by the enormous upward expansion of the world-economy after 1945, the biggest in the history of the modern world-system. There was plenty of money available for the universities, and they were happy to make use of it.

Of course, this changed the university systems somewhat. Individual universities became much larger and began to lose the quality of intimacy that smaller structures provided. The class composition of the student body, and then of the professorate, evolved. In many countries, expansion not only meant a reduction in the monopoly of upper strata persons as students, professors, and administrators, but it often meant that "minority" groups and women began to have wider access, which had previously been totally or at least partially denied.

This rosy picture came into difficulty after about 1970. For one thing, the world-economy entered its long stagnation. And little by little, the amount of money that universities received, largely from the states, began to diminish. At the same time, the costs of university education continued to rise, and the pressures from below for continued expansion grew even stronger. The story ever since has been that of the two curves going in opposite directions - less money and increased expenses.

By the time we arrived at the twenty-first century, this situation became dire. How have universities coped? One major way was what we have come to call "privatization." Most universities before 1945, and even before 1970, were state institutions. The one significant exception was the United States, which had a large number of non-state institutions, most of which had evolved from religiously-based institutions. But even in these U.S. private institutions, the universities were run as non-profit structures.

What privatization began to mean throughout the world was several things: One, there began to be institutions of higher education that were established as businesses for profit. Two, public institutions began to seek and obtain money from corporate donors, which began to intrude in the internal governance of the universities. And three, universities began to seek patents for work that researchers at the university had discovered or invented, and thereupon entered as operators in the economy, that is, as businesses.

In a situation in which money was scarce, or at least seemed scarce, universities began to transform themselves into more business-like institutions. This could be seen in two major ways. The top administrative positions of universities and their faculties, which had traditionally been occupied by academics, now began to be occupied by persons whose background was in business and not university life. They raised the money, but they also began to set the criteria of allocation of the money.

There began to be evaluations of whole universities and of departments within universities in terms of their output for the money invested. This might be measured by how many students wished to pursue particular studies, or how esteemed was the research output of given universities or departments. Intellectual life was being judged by pseudo-market criteria. Even student recruitment was being measured by how much money was brought in via alternative methods of recruitment.

And, if this weren't enough, the universities began to come under attack from a basically anti-intellectual far right current that saw the universities as secular, anti-religious institutions. The university as a critical institution - critical of dominant groups and dominant ideologies - had always met with resistance and repression by the states and the elites. But their powers of survival had always been rooted in their relative financial autonomy based on the low real cost of operation. This was the university of yesteryear, not of today - and tomorrow.

One can write this off as simply one more aspect of the global chaos in which we are now living. Except that the universities were supposed to play the role of one major locus (not of course the only one) of analysis of the realities of our world-system. It is such analyses that may make possible the successful navigation of the chaotic transition towards a new, and hopefully better, world order. At the moment, the turmoil within the universities seems no easier to resolve than the turmoil in the world-economy. And even less attention is being paid to it.

[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein, distributed by Agence Global]

Current rate of ocean acidification may be unprecidented

The current issue of Science includes The Geological Record of Ocean Acidification, the first summary of the geologic record for evidence of ocean acidification over the past 300 million years. The article suggests the world's oceans may be turning acidic faster today from human carbon emissions than they did during four major extinctions in the last 300 million years, when natural pulses of carbon sent global temperatures soaring. The complex set of processes examined in the article are summarized in the diagram below.

The press release has a nice summary:

The oceans act like a sponge to draw down excess carbon dioxide from the air; the gas reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid, which over time is neutralized by fossil carbonate shells on the seafloor. But if CO2 goes into the oceans too quickly, it can deplete the carbonate ions that corals, mollusks and some plankton need for reef and shell-building.

That is what is happening now. In a review of hundreds of paleoceanographic studies, a team of researchers from five countries found evidence for only one period in the last 300 million years when the oceans changed even remotely as fast as today: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, some 56 million years ago. In the early 1990s, scientists extracting sediments from the seafloor off Antarctica found a layer of mud from this period wedged between thick deposits of white plankton fossils. In a span of about 5,000 years, they estimated, a mysterious surge of carbon doubled atmospheric concentrations, pushed average global temperatures up by about 6 degrees C, and dramatically changed the ecological landscape.

The result: carbonate plankton shells littering the seafloor dissolved, leaving the brown layer of mud. As many as half of all species of benthic foraminifers, a group of single-celled organisms that live at the ocean bottom, went extinct, suggesting that organisms higher in the food chain may have also disappeared, said study co-author Ellen Thomas, a paleoceanographer at Yale University who was on that pivotal Antarctic cruise. "It's really unusual that you lose more than 5 to 10 percent of species over less than 20,000 years," she said. "It's usually on the order of a few percent over a million years." During this time, scientists estimate, ocean pH—a measure of acidity--may have fallen as much as 0.45 units. (As pH falls, acidity rises.)

In the last hundred years, atmospheric CO2 has risen about 30 percent, to 393 parts per million, and ocean pH has fallen by 0.1 unit, to 8.1--an acidification rate at least 10 times faster than 56 million years ago, says Hönisch. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that pH may fall another 0.3 units by the end of the century, to 7.8, raising the possibility that we may soon see ocean changes similar to those observed during the PETM.

Mitch Dobrowner's Epic Storms

There are few things more majestic and awe inspiring than a good storm. And few people capture storm clouds and the raw power of nature as well as Mitch Dobrowner.

Energy Links

1)  Tom Murphy, over at Do the Math, has a number of interesting energy posts, including a helpful guide to his blog posts. Among my favorites are the following:

• Galactic scale energy -- in which the annual growth in US energy consumption over the last 350 years is shown to be a fairly stable 2.9% and that, were global power demand to grow at an annual rate of 2.3% for the next 345 years we would reach the point where we were consuming all the suns energy hitting land (and, in about 2500 years would require all the energy in the galaxy!)
• Peak Oil Perspective -- not surprisingly, talks about peak oil
• The last few posts have begun to bring together and summarize a number of themes that run through many of the previous posts. Among them are The Alternative Energy Matrix which examines a variety of different alternative energy sources in terms of a diverse set of criteria (abundance, demonstrated feasibility, intermittancy, public acceptance, efficiency, viability for different purposes -- electricity, heat, transport; etc.) and finds that they generally score lower than fossil fuels. Fossil Fuels, I'm Not Dead Yet examines the peak oil problem as a liquid fuels issue -- that is in terms of energy for transportation fuel. This theme carries forward in The Way is Shut which notes:

The good news is that there do exist energy flows and sources that qualify as abundant or at least potent. However, many of the alternatives represent ways to produce electricity, which applies only to about one-third of our current energy demand. The immediate threat is therefore the short term liquid fuels crunch we will see when the global petroleum decline commences within the decade.

2)  The concept of an Energy Return on Investment Threshold suggests that fuels with an EROEI of less than 8 become increasingly problematic as the proportion of energy used to procure energy relative to the proportion that provides net energy for society's use starts to increase dramatically.

Incontrovertable visual evidence of climate change

Argument #1: Winter

Argument #2: Summer

Enough said!

Transformation, Vulnerability and Resilience

Emilio Moran poses an interesting question, what makes social ecological systems more vulnerable and less resilient?, in his recent article Transformation of social and ecological systems. The bulk of the article is a rather sweeping history of humanity aimed at emphasizing the unique nature of our current situation. In the conclusion, quoted after the break, Moran identifies the factors he sees as responsible for making current systems more vulnerable and less resilient: Hypercoherence, loss of redundancy, loss of trust and a sense of community, and the misuse of information by decision-makers.  Read on .....

New design, mobile template now available

The title pretty much says it all.

I briefly ventured into the world of dynamic designs, but none of them kept the material on the right hand sidebar. Stupidly, I forgot to back up the old design before giving the dynamic designs a test drive -- so I had to find another one to apply. This is the result. Enjoy!

Heartland gets Desmoged

Desmogblog has an interesting post documenting the climate denial activities of the Heartland Institute, complete with links to a number of original documents at Heartland Institute Exposed: Internal Documents Unmask Heart of Climate Denial Machine. Additional analysis, including a description of plans to convince grade schoolers that climate science is a "major scientific controversy" is available at Thinkprogress.

Feb 19 Update: The Guardian has an interesting follow-up on the consequences of the revealed Hartland documents, including information about a letter from climate scientists to the Institute asking them to "recognise how its attacks on science and scientists have poisoned the debate about climate change policy," and the revelation that the Institute's tax-exempt status is being challenged. There are also claims that one of the released documents is fake. The Toxic Debate Over Climate Science has an interesting take on these developments.

Local Pollution Havens in the US

Todd Matthews just published The Enduring Conflict of ‘‘Jobs Versus the Environment’’: Local Pollution Havens as an Integrative Empirical Measure of Economy versus Environment.

Building of Fruedenberg's concept of disproportionality -- unequal access to environmental rights and resources observable in the privileges accrued by relatively few actors to create highly uneven levels of polluting emissions per job created -- Matthews develops the concept of a Local Pollution Haven. These are counties that combine three characteristics: 1) high levels of pollution per amount of economic reward, 2) high levels of toxicity per amount of economic reward and 3) low levels of regulatory control. Here's a map showing the distribution of such counties. Not surprisingly, the havens are heavily concentrated in the South (specifically, the states of Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi). When compared to non-pollution haven counties, the havens are typically metropolitan or adjacent to metropolitan counties with higher levels of economic inequality, more than twice the proportion of blacks, and little in-migration. Notably missing is the state of Louisiana, often targeted in the environmental justice literature for its predilection to locate refineries and other aspects of the petrochemical industry in poor counties populated by people of color.

Additional details are in the abstract:

The ‘‘jobs versus the environment’’ dichotomy has been a recurring theme in the United States for decades. It is typically taken to refer to a choice or trade-off between economic growth and development and environmental quality or the lack of environmental degradation. Little resolution has occurred after decades of research because of inconsistent or problematic conceptualization and the use of inappropriate spatial units of analysis. Research on international and domestic pollution havens is reviewed in an effort to introduce the Local Pollution Havens concept. Local pollution havens are conceptualized as counties with high levels of pollution per unit of economic reward, high toxicity per unit of economic reward, and low regulation or other social controls. Traditional and spatial statistical techniques are utilized to construct this measure and determine which counties fit the conceptualization. Descriptive statistics and the results of t-tests and logistic regression analyses are presented to demonstrate how these areas differ from other counties. Implications for the remediation of these areas and also avenues of future research are offered.

Reference: Sociological Spectrum 31: 59–85, 2011; DOI: 10.1080/02732173.2011.525696

Klinenberg: Going Solo

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg, author of the noted and controversial social autopsy of the 1995 Chicago heat wave, has just published Going Solo, a fascinating study of a relatively under-discussed demographic trend -- living alone. A variety of the studies findings are highlighted in his op-ed piece One's a Crowd:

MORE people live alone now than at any other time in history. ... The decision to live alone is common in diverse cultures whenever it is economically feasible. Although Americans pride themselves on their self-reliance and culture of individualism, Germany, France and Britain have a greater proportion of one-person households than the United States, as does Japan. ....

The mere thought of living alone once sparked anxiety, dread and visions of loneliness. But those images are dated. Now the most privileged people on earth use their resources to separate from one another, to buy privacy and personal space.

Living alone comports with modern values. It promotes freedom, personal control and self-realization — all prized aspects of contemporary life.

It is less feared, too, for the crucial reason that living alone no longer suggests an isolated or less-social life. After interviewing more than 300 singletons (my term for people who live alone) during nearly a decade of research, I’ve concluded that living alone seems to encourage more, not less, social interaction.

Paradoxically, our species, so long defined by groups and by the nuclear family, has been able to embark on this experiment in solo living because global societies have become so interdependent. Dynamic markets, flourishing cities and open communications systems make modern autonomy more appealing; they give us the capacity to live alone but to engage with others when and how we want to and on our own terms.

In fact, living alone can make it easier to be social, because single people have more free time, absent family obligations, to engage in social activities.
....
Today five million people in the United States between ages 18 and 34 live alone, 10 times more than in 1950. But the largest number of single people are middle-aged; 15 million people between ages 35 and 64 live alone. Those who decide to live alone following a breakup or a divorce could choose to move in with roommates or family. But many of those I interviewed said they chose to live alone because they had found there was nothing worse than living with the wrong person.