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Is your college prepared for climate change? Bryan Alexander's new book, Universities on Fire, is a structured series of speculations about what that might mean. It's a useful, and sometimes harrowing, reality check. I won't be able to stop thinking about this one for a long time.
We all owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Bryan Alexander for his efforts to provide a common framework and scenarios to enable universities leaders to develop proactive strategies and policies to meet current and future climate change challenges. Through his book, Universities on FireBryan has helped to push the climate crisis to the center of higher ed conversations.
[Universities on Fire] contains much...of value—from how colleges and universities in the United States help the towns they are in to develop environmental plans, to telling us how universities, like Pepperdine University in Southern California, have had to develop extensive fire prevention plans because of the danger that wildfires will sweep through the region.
Brisk, inspiring, and sobering.
[Alexander] give gives a measured analysis of both the literal and metaphorical fires that the sector faces. He...looks at the difficulties universities might face in a world of mass migration, as ecosystems collapse and species die out, and offers helpful surveys of how universities could respond in their teaching and research, and in their relationships with both local and global communities.
In Universities on Fire, Bryan Alexander explores how the climate crisis will impact higher education institutions, particularly until 2100. He covers impacts on campus, research, and teaching, and how these activities are already changing to respond to climate change. He also investigates the relationship between universities and local communities, as well as national and international structures. Different scenarios are presented, as well as practical options for acting on them.
Universities on Fire is an engaging and highly topical book. Replete with fantastic examples of innovations and visions of the future for universities, this book provides useful practical recommendations and covers how climate change will impact all relevant areas of universities, including teaching, research, engagement, and campus operations. There are not many accounts of how the university as a physical space will be affected by the evolving climate crisis, so this book will be relevant to the leadership of universities around the world.
The labs of the world's great universities gave us the warning about the climate crisis—but now these universities, like all other institutions, have to deal with its scary reality. This book offers some sage ideas about what it means to teach and study amidst a conflagration.
A compelling account of the intersection of academia and climate change from one of our foremost futurists. Using trends and scenarios, Bryan Alexander offers a wide-ranging overview of the threats and opportunities posed to higher education by climate change. By expanding the option space, the book promotes insights that will help stakeholders of colleges and universities understand and assess ways to mitigate or adapt to disruptive challenges.
Bryan Alexander's Universities on Fire is an urgent and necessary book, a must-read around which whole conferences should be organized, because climate change will profoundly impact higher education, and, as Alexander argues, we have agency and a role to play in shaping its inevitable impacts. If we prepare now.
Read this if you want to think clearly and productively about the future and your role in it. This book should be of interest to faculty, students, administrators, and anyone concerned about the climate—which is all thinking people.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x 9
Pages
288
ISBN
9781421446486
Illustration Description
1 b&w photo, 11 b&w illus.
Table of Contents
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: academia wades into the Anthropocene
Part 1: Universities on Fire, Under Water
1. Uprooting the campus
2. Doing research in the Anthropocene
3. Teaching to the
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: academia wades into the Anthropocene
Part 1: Universities on Fire, Under Water
1. Uprooting the campus
2. Doing research in the Anthropocene
3. Teaching to the end of the world
Part 2: The World, The College, and the Global Emergency
4. Town gown
5. The world
Part 3: Choices for Universities in a World on Fire
6. Best and worst case
7. What is to be done
Notes
Index
