by Ryan Harding

Last year, Hannah Jones, VP of Sustainable Business at Nike, wrote that businesses must adjust their sights, and begin to see sustainability as a “strategic prism.” The line of thinking Jones adopts seems to be an iteration of a familiar idea: to gain a competitive advantage in today’s progressively green-minded marketplace, sustainability must be allowed to develop into a constitutive strategic element driving and leading the commercial activities of businesses. Sustainability in the 21st century, Jones reflects, has developed into “a core strategic imperative for any company that intends to thrive and grow in the years ahead.”

Beyond labeling sustainability a “core strategic imperative”, or, translated into the rather muddled parlance in which I write, a universal social imperative, Jones underscores the transformative impact of transparency in the promotion of social movements encouraging structural changes to existing cultural paradigms. Put another way, in detailing how technology-derived and -related social pressures are not only driving corporations and governments to become more transparent, but have, in some way, directed the distribution of corporate and state-owned resources and become “a trigger for movements and political action,” Jones begins to trace the contours of a revolution that will come to define the Information Age.

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by Ryan Harding

Warning! What follows is a rather esoteric discussion of an ongoing debate centering on one early modern political theorist’s purported views on the value and function of a nation’s educational apparatus, seeing it a conduit to disseminate a specific brand of political or social dogma. Have I lost you? Trust me, this short discussion illustrates an important point—just bear with me.

On one side of this arcane debate, we have commenters who believe this unnamed political theorist seemed to see education as a social institution which can be easily politicized, and used to systematically inculcate a nation’s citizenry. Commentators on this side of the debate object to how this political theorist seems to envisage the institution of education as an arm of the state, which can be easily bent and used by the state as a means of brainwashing individual citizens. On the other side of the debate are a group of people (myself included) who see this political theorist, and the object of the theory he created, through a far less nefarious lens. That is, we see his motives as more noble than villainous. According to this lot, he sought to use the university as a means by which to bring about social accord, but not by disseminating a particular brand of political theology. Rather, by promoting and cultivating knowledge and understanding conducive to the common good—the curriculum taught by the university should transcend local politics and set its sights on creating an informed and socially aware citizenry.

Both sides seem to converge over one point in particular: that the university sits at an important crossroads and wields an inordinate amount of power because of it.

Without getting too in depth about how a university’s curriculum should look, or saying something which might inadvertently trample on academic freedom (something of which I am a staunch and unyielding proponent), I think what is important to draw from this debate is that the university, because of its function, is uniquely situated to lead the charge in the promotion of social change (for the better, I hope).

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