Leveraging Higher Education's Role in Social Evolution: A Paradigmatic Strategy

Abstract

Institutions can empower the human capacity to work through conflict and collaborate in solving complex problems by establishing structures designed to (1) support universal access to high-quality knowledge; (2) develop postformal reasoning, mature social competencies, and the disposition to exercise these capacities in service of the good; and (3) remove institutional barriers to such service. Higher education is a metasystem well positioned to help evolve such institutional structures if designed to do so. Five patterns of cross-disciplinary knowledge and an action agenda for such redesign can be understood by considering a retrospective narrative from an imagined future.

KEYWORDS:

• Action agenda
• cross-disciplinary
• higher education metasystem
• postformal reasoning

Notes

1. In Coliseum Gardens, a two hundred-unit public housing project, described as “so dangerous fire engines would not enter without a police escort,” with “the highest rates of homicide and drug-related arrests in the city of Oakland, California,” community police and community leaders were trained in a resiliency-based human services program supported by Santa Clara County. After two years, homicides had “dropped by 100 percent” (Mills, 1997) and after five years, no further homicides had occurred, a total of five years at last report (R. Mills, pers. comm.)