"In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."
Eric Hoffer
We are indeed in times of change, and at an historical first. All of the world's cultures are now available to us, with the totality of human knowledge open to our study.1 What an auspicious and robust setting for post-secondary study; how fortunate are the students and the professors who are seeking the experience, wisdom, and patterns of the past for their edification and for those of future generations! Computers proliferate, bringing knowledge to most of the planet, and globalization feeds the desire to access that knowledge. Certainly the universities of the future will thrive in this rich environment.
And yet…the books, articles and reports from our civilization's great centers of learning do not report the feeling of fulfillment of humanity's lust for knowledge. At this extraordinary moment we find instead the grumblings and irritations of educational participants and leaders that indicate more of a feeling of deficiency than of needs finally met.
The report of the US Commission on the Future of Higher Education paints a picture of American educational downward slide. One member observed, "The commission made a very strong statement around the idea that we cannot continue to do higher education the way we have been."2
Mary S. Alexander observes that upon taking her first teaching position, she was "…shocked to discover that our new students aren't interested in ideas [italics mine], just in the jobs they hope to get as a result of suffering through our courses…. We discover that education today is about increasing enrollment and justifying costs—or, to be more blunt, about customer satisfaction…. Syllabi were once general ideas and lists of books…, Now they are contracts for knowledge to be delivered…. That is the opposite of the culture of graduate school. It is the opposite of what I imagined my life as a teacher would be."3
No less than the former dean of Harvard College, Harry R. Lewis has written a dispirited account of the pride of American academia in Excellence Without A Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education.
Research on Western college-age youth indicates that they are manifesting high rates of depression, eating disorders, and other forms of mental illness.4 Australian adolescents and young adults responding to researchers convey feelings of loss of meaning and hopelessness about the future.5
Why are we not learners? With computers proliferating worldwide, why hasn't technology in academia led to an intellectual golden age to rival the times of Plato and Aristotle? Why does a pall hang over modern universities and those who teach in and attend them? Indeed, what is the future of the university if its current state is one of dis-ease?
"I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past."
Edward Gibbon
The 'lamp of experience' might illuminate, but without a map we are in a quandary as to what we are actually seeing. We are fortunate at this critical moment that we possess Ken Wilber's orienting map, known as AQAL, or all quadrants, all levels, lines, states and types.6 This composite culled from the world's wisdom is an integral map, one that permits us to index the plethora of knowledge we now possess and, most importantly, to make use of this knowledge across cultures and domains which ordinarily perceive one another as foreign entities.
In brief, the Integral Map or Model is based on five categories of perspectives, or dimensions of reality: four quadrants (individual interior, individual exterior, collective interior, collective exterior); states of consciousness (such as waking, dreaming, and deep sleep); stages or levels of individual and cultural development; multiple intelligences; and types (such as male and female). Once we engage this map, we can be sure that our 'lamp of experience' will shine on all aspects of human existence, and we are better positioned to extrapolate and to envision the universities of the future.
Academics are aware that there has been growth and development, or simply evolution, in the unfolding of knowledge. Humanity at its most developed edge has moved through pre-modern/pre-scientific/pre-rational cultures or worldviews through which we understood reality, to the modern/Enlightenment/rational/scientific worldview, on to a postmodern worldview. It is as if this segment of humanity has moved up the mountain, is capable of seeing more of the terrain below as it climbs, and is sensitive to wider vistas. But just as the child must appear before the adolescent and the adult, we find that some academic institutions in other cultures might maintain pre-scientific worldviews in spite of their use of computer technology and Western cultural artifacts.
Similarly, when we analyze global reports from institutions of higher learning and then attempt to extrapolate 'the future of universities,' we first need to interpret our findings in the context of where these institutions are located on our mountainside. Contemplating the idea that the proliferation of computers in academia will have a singular effect is akin to assuming that an oncoming wave will hit the surfer with the same impact as the observer on the hilltop. Laptops provided at Cambridge will have impacts far different from laptops provided to Madrassas. The causes of academic dispirit in the industrialized-transitioning-into-knowledge-economy nations differ from those in nations that have yet to transition into knowledge economies. They will be afflicted with some of the problems that face schools in the West, but they will be free from others.
These variant levels of intellectual and cultural development impact the widely held belief that universal higher education protects human rights. Especially in pre-modern cultures, higher education provided through government-sponsored schools is often a pretense for indoctrination of the young in both religious and political beliefs. Pre-modern societies function at a similar level throughout the Four Quadrants, with their moral level at egocentric, and their attention restricted to pre-rational knowledge bases that enmesh their scientific and religious understandings.
It was critical for Western universities three hundred years ago to differentiate science from religion so that a rendering of objective external reality would not result in loss of life due to running afoul of some religious heresy. This ushered in the modern era and a conventional, ethnocentric moral base with attention paid to tribe, clan, or nation. Regardless of their access to global influences or modern technologies, universities within conventional cultures will restrict access to all but 'acceptable' data.
The postmodern cultural worldview has redressed many of these abuses, and thus contributed to the evolution of our universities by their challenge to meta-narratives and the myth of the given. Their morality embraces the entire world, and they have deep concern for the marginalized within their societies. But their deconstruction of the modern world has dampened the kindling that fired education over the ages, and left us with mulch: finely ground-up and strewn fragments of the world's collective wisdom left in a disassociated heap that confounds the learners and the learned.
Fortunately, we are able to detect an even higher altitude from which to assess the past and guide the future—an integral vision. Those at the highest altitudes with this vision will be able to better predict the trajectory of the evolution of universities and thus be more effective in avoiding harm and encouraging healthy development. The integral worldview transcends and includes all that humanity has to offer, and is Kosmic-centric in its moral orientation.
From this even higher altitude, those who have traversed through the earlier stages or levels are capable of greater clarity when viewing the university—now seen not as a discrete, singular, atomistic institution, but a whole/part embedded inextricably within its cultural and socioeconomic systems. Since all whole/parts can be analyzed by virtue of their interior/exterior and individual/collective natures, and since each of these is capable of being viewed from its own inside and outside perspective, we come up with eight 'primordial perspectives' by which to assess the university. Further, each perspective comes with an academically respected methodology by which it can be studied.
To give one example, the singular subjective 'I' can be viewed from inside via phenomenology, or from the outside by structuralism. Plural intersubjective studies of the 'We' can be experienced internally by hermeneutics, and assessed from its outside by ethnomethodology. The singular exterior of the 'It' can be understood through such interior means as autopoiesis (cognitive science, for our purposes), while its exterior can be assessed by empirical studies such as neurophysiology. Finally, the plural interobjective of 'Its' has an interior means of study by social autopoiesis and an exterior study by systems theory. Thus, the AQAL map provides us with higher altitude and perspective which, when detailed, gives us eight primordial perspectives by which we can assess any university within any culture or era, in a sense situating it within its 'address.' (For a more in-depth look at the AQAL map, go to http://www.kenwilber.com/professional/writings/index.html). Limiting the study of the future of universities to systems theory or other plural interobjective perspectives is to do an injustice to the topic and to grossly limit any potential understanding to the most superficial level.
To return to our central question as to why we do not see the birth of a new golden era of learners and learning, we need to address the other core question about what universities have been charged with accomplishing.
Broadly speaking, universities exist to transmit the culture, values, and lessons of the past to the current generation, and to prepare young adults for the world in which they will live.7 In modern cultures we see that universities exist to transmit the 'given,' the 'only true word,' to acculturate their young. Postmodern universities deny the metanarratives that gave substance and meaning to their learners (that one 'truth' exists, as posited by any higher authority), and embrace the once marginalized. But at the same time, they have left their putative 'learners' profoundly distrustful, in a vast wasteland where nothing may be elevated beyond anything else, and no judgments about 'truth' dare be offered.
We know that changes in the collective exterior such as globalization, the scientific information explosion, and the emergence of computers in education can be studied using systems theory (for the outside of the 'Its' in the plural interobjective) or social autopoiesis (for the inside of the 'Its'). From these methodologies it becomes apparent that knowledge and human capital are becoming as important as industrial plants; that the volume of new knowledge is growing exponentially; and that technological determinism is posited as the sensible response to achieve our dual aims.
But wait—there is more around us that we dare not ignore: more addresses, worldspaces, places to inhabit. This is not 'all there is' when we look at our universities. For each perspective that the Integral educator, student, or administrator engages, there is "an action, an injunction, a concrete set of actions in a real world zone. Each injunction brings forth or discloses the phenomena that are apprehended through the various perspectives. It is not that perspectives come first and actions or injunctions come later; they simultaneously co-arise or actually, tetra-arise."8
Having thus replaced perceptions of reality with perspectives, and apprehending that one has a perspective prior to having a perception, we are called by AQAL methodology to witness an opening for an Integral post-metaphysics. Simply put, there will now be room for that which has been banned from the academy for a very long time: consideration of and respect for the subjective 'I' and intersubjective 'We' which we will view through the sliding scale of developmental stages such as egocentric, ethnocentric, and worldcentric.
We can no longer delude ourselves that by grasping one small part of the truth of reality, we have succeeded in grasping it all. To do so is to deceive ourselves, to miss the complexity and intrinsic richness of our experience and the horizon of evolution. Nor are we better situated in the postmodern limbo that posits no truth and no reality save our own constructs. Once we settle into the understanding that the Eight Primordial Perspectives tetra-arise through an injunction or action, we can understand that our intentional actions do indeed have discernible consequences. That does not imply, however, that we should embrace the powerful manipulation of knowledge or the means by which knowledge is delivered. Forcing the use of computer-mediated education to deliver scientific knowledge to all will not lead to raising everyone's boat. By ignoring the other aspects of our AQAL map, we would, instead, be creating a tsunami by which many would be blindsided.
This 'quadrant absolutism'—or rather, the exaggerated belief in and exclusive reliance upon the Lower Right 'Its' exteriors—is a part, one small part, of what we can avoid as we look for answers to the challenges posed by globalization and technology. Exclusive attention to the 'I,' or the Upper Left interior, is not an answer either. It has manifested in many parts of academia recently as the 'I' of self-centered egotism ("No one tells me what to do"), which meshed well with the belief that the purpose of education was to permit the individual to secure the material benefits of the society as represented by the culture's celebration of economic materialism (found in the Lower Right's 'Its' collective exterior).
Harry Lewis ruefully reports, "Universities lack confidence that they know what they are doing…. From the beginning, science and globalization drove the review [of curricular changes]…. This superimposition of economic motivations on ivory-tower themes has exposed a university without a larger sense of educational purpose or a connection to its principal constituents…. The relationship of the student to the college is increasingly that of a consumer to a vendor of expensive goods and services."9 He further bemoans that instructors no longer know what to teach, why they are teaching it, how to grade it, or why they even do so.
But when we shine our light in a broad swath, these critiques of postmodern academia catch the pulsating and never-dimmed perspective of the subjective and intersubjective 'I' and 'We' interiors. We cannot ignore Vartan Gregorian's observation: "Humanity has always craved meaning and wholeness, and when people do not have the ability or the knowledge to separate fact from fiction, to question deeply, to integrate knowledge, or to see coherence and meaning in life, they feel a deeply unsettling emptiness at the core of their lives."10
In contemplation, in meditative absorption, in centering prayer, ecstatic dance and yoga, the interior view has been there all along. We see cries for its honoring in both Western and Eastern religious and spiritual traditions, but the postmodern academy is wary of inviting it in lest it be of the 'wrong' type of interior knowing, or because it cannot be quantified as the objective singular and plural forms of knowledge can. Pre-modern, modern, and even postmodern spirituality and religion can indeed rock the academic boat sufficiently to cause it to capsize. A subjective or intersubjective interior practice that is mismatched to the healthy functioning of its whole/part-ness, can indeed present a real danger.
So what do we do, now that we understand that the interiors and exteriors of the individual and the collective must be included with the whole/part functioning of our universities of the present and the future? Those who work at presenting the healthiest 'address' for themselves individually will be able to contribute to the healthiest functioning of their institutions, whether these universities exist in the future as brick-and-mortar buildings, or as the open universities made possible by computer-mediated delivery of information. Individuals embodying an Integral awareness understand that their healthy functioning is essential to the good of the whole, and will also be aware of the 'others', inside and outside of their university, who are on that mountain with them.
Seventy percent of the world's population is at an ethnocentric or lower 'altitude,' meaning that universities in those cultures or functioning for that demographic will be far below the other 30% in their meaning-making capabilities. Whether they have virtual classrooms or computer chips implanted in their cortexes, their perspectives will be truncated to delivery of 'the one truth' and by exclusion of those perceived as 'others.' To make matters worse, the levels of consciousness represented in the 70% and the other 30% cannot live together without severely clashing. Further, technological methods of destruction are equally available to those who wish the rest of us ill.
But there seems to be an immutable law of what Wilber calls 'the conveyor belt' of human development.11 When basic needs and drives of the individuals and the societies are met, they travel up the mountainside to a higher, more caring, more inclusive way of functioning. Some parts of the 70% will traverse from ethnocentric into worldcentric, and those at worldcentric may well transition into Integral. Thus we can predict the coming of an Integral wave in the next decade.
And so I have the glimmer of an answer to Lewis' Excellence Without a Soul, and to others looking into the mists of the future to detect what shape the universities of tomorrow will have.
Prepare for us. Permit us to dine on the finest, most robust meaning-making meals to nourish us spiritually and relationally as well as technologically. Take heed of the wisdom of our ancestors and our current geniuses who know that we are a meaning-making species; that we seek after an Ultimate because we intuit that an Ultimate can be experienced. Do not shirk from our doing so within the shape of future universities, for all 'good knowledge' consists of three strands: an injunction ("if you want to know this, do that"), an experience (the data or awareness brought forth by the enaction of that injunction), and a communal confirmation or rejection by those who have completed the first two strands.12
With this and the AQAL model in your consciousness, you will be able to reclaim your mission, decide on curricula that engage and excite, and make wiser decisions about your next steps. Watch us move up the mountain; provide us with the best means by which to traverse those stages; nurture the coming Integral Wave of learners from the highest and healthiest altitude you individually and collectively can manage; and welcome those who have reached that plateau with joy.
1 Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality, Boston, MA, Integral Books, 2006.
2 Robert W. Mendenhall quoted in "Commission Calls Colleges
'Self-Satisfied' and 'Risk-Averse,'" Chronicle of Higher Education, A44, Sept. 1, 2006.
3 Mary S. Alexander, "Taking All the Fun Out of Education," Chronicle of Higher Education, B20, Sept. 1, 2006.
4 Bashir and Bennett (2000) quoted in "'Education For All' or Education For Wisdom?" Jennifer Gidley, www.metafuture.org.
5 Eckersley (1993) and Gidley (1998) quoted in "'Education for All' or Education For Wisdom?" Jennifer Gidley. www.metafuture.org.
6 See www.kenwilber.com/professional/writings/index.html
7 Andrew Molnar, "Computers in Education: A Brief History," www.thejournal.com. June, 1997.
8 Wilber, op cit.
9 Harry R. Lewis, Excellence Without A Soul: How A Great
University Forgot Education (Public Affairs, 2006), pp.2-7.
10 Vartan Gregorian, "Grounding Technology in Both Science and
Significance," Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 9, 2005.
11 Wilber, op cit. 12 Wilber, op cit.
Lynne D. Feldman is the Vice Chancellor of Integral University, Director of the Integral Education Center, and co-founder of www.integral-ed.org/forum. She received her graduate certification in teaching, and taught high school government and history before attending law school, where she received the Am Jur Prize in trial practice. Lynne has won numerous awards for her activism in getting students interested in the democratic process. The Governor of New Jersey appointed her to the Character Education Commission.
