https://ic-sd.org/  AT UNGA75 SEPT 2020 FIRSTUN GENERAL ASSEMBLY TO ZOOM WORLDWIDE AS COVID PREVENTED LEADERS ASSEMBLING FOR WEEK IN EW YORK

Session 1 DEBATE FAILURE TO ACHIEVE SDGS WILL BE FAILURE OF UNIVERSITY

Plenary 1, University Leadership for the Decade of Action
03:00 – 04:00 UTC |  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6Bwtrg9IpDnypQ7t_jjAYQ

The session will showcase innovative approaches that universities in the Asia/Pacific region are implementing to increase their societal value and impact on the SDGs, as well as the challenges and opportunities to accelerate these actions and make them part of a new “business-as-usual” for universities. The session is partially in response to the challenge made by President Mike Crow of Arizona State University at a recent event of the UN Higher Education Sustainability Initiative, that universities need to change the way they operate and be more connected to the community to have real impact.

Speakers:

• John Thwaites, Chair, Monash Sustainable Development Institute (Moderator)
• Michael Crow, President, Arizona State University
• Dawn Freshwater, Vice-Chancellor, University of Auckland
• Kit Poon, Professor, School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University

 

john thwaites -welcome everyone to this un plenary session

where we're going to discuss what universities need to do to contribute to lasting positive impact

in achieving the sustainable development goals

00:46

universities can certainly help implement the goals through their research their education

their operations and through their leadership in the community

00:59

universities say they want to have a positive impact on the world and on

implementation of the sdgs but are universities really up to it

01:12

do universities need to change to be more connected to their communities

and to have a real and lasting impact on the sustainable development goals

01:22

this is the subject that we're going to discuss in this plenary session of the international conference today

01:30

we're going to discuss how universities need to change and also hear about some specific

measures that universities are taking to maximize their impact

01:42

we've got some really outstanding speakers at universities who have bee

grappling with this challenge of relevance and impact

01:53

our first speaker is mike crowe who is the president of arizona state university

and has spearheaded that university's evolution into one of the world's most innovative

universities focused on global complex challenges..

under president crowe's leadership asu has established 25 new transdisciplinary schools but also

trailblazing initiatives including the julianne wrigley global institute of sustainability

today's session at the icsd was really inspired by president crowe and the address he

recently gave to a meeting of university presidents organized by the sustainable

development solutions network associated with the high-level political forum at the united nations in

july this year

 at that meeting president crow threw out a challenge to universities and said that they need to change the way they operate if we're to have real impact now i'd like to welcome president crow

 

03:13

thank you uh john it's great to see you

03:15

And  i really welcome chance to be here

particularly with this 10-year focus of leadership for the decade UN action and really with a focus on

universities and i want to say something seemingly outlandish

 

03:36

1 our non-attainment of the kind of sustainability development goals that we're all working toward -that is our difficulty in reaching any of these goals- people want to attribute  highly economically

capitalists who are at the end of the day too greedy to be able to attain these goals

and i would say that's certainly an issue

 

2 but as big an issue are the universities themselves and i'd like to put on the table the notion that universities are as responsible for our predicament as any other class of institutions

-and the reason i can say that -and we could spend a lot of time working to justify that statement-

is that here we are about 400 years into the whole notion of organized science -the whole notion of uh

 the massive understanding that we have of nature today

04:31

 some of our disciplines are 400 years old, some 200 years old

their modern science and what's the net- but what is the net outcome of that?

04:42

outcome one- that we have human driven climate change

 regardless of our insights, regardless of our knowledge , regardless of our perspectives

04:52

we still have ended up in a predicament where we've become the dominant negative driving force in the

relationship between ourselves as a species and the planet

 

so for all our insights and all of our knowledge and all of our achievements here we are and so and so we don't know as much as we think that we know or if we know it we don't know how to communicate it

or if we know it and don't know how to communicate it we don't know how to get it working

05:18

second  we’re 400 years into this massive renaissance- this massive uh

a set of insights and scientific understandings and scientific perspectives yet we have

massive and accelerating inequities among our people

05:34 and these inequities are even attributable to only some being able to benefit from the

insights and perspectives and the tools and the knowledge and the scientific

understandings that we have

05:46

i think a very significant net outcome of our 400 years of accumulated science

and accelerated science third for whatever reason

we've decided to live in an ancient cave-like structure where one body of knowledge economics and another body of knowledge science and another body of knowledge technology and another body of knowledge medicine and another body of knowledge behavior have a few overlapping and

connecting insights and perspectives but for the most part they're disconnected

06:16

we have we have not spent much energy or time on the notion of a unifying set of

theories or practices, we've not spent much time teaching people to understand other

disciplines, understand other knowledge at the level that we should

06:30

and so this third area the set of disconnected theories, disconnected bodies

have not really put us into a position where you know whatever we do there's some

argument against it, there's some lack of understanding there's some lack of

respect-06:43

the physicists don't respect biologists; the biologists don't respect the social scientists uh to the degree

that they should and so therefore we haven't made unified conceptualization about how to move

forward

06:57

and then the fourth and final net outcome of 400 years of accelerating science

is that we have accepted within our account within the universities themselves not

all but most prominently the case a slow institution

07:10

with no reality based in regular time measurement-

the climate is changing and advancing, and any of the outcomes we're now

beginning to experience are moving faster than our institutions even gather

to meet and discuss things

07:24

 and so I am not being facetious when I say we universities are

 a slow sector , we are siloed and i also say that we end up being

accepting of the selfish behavior and in our own inward lookingness

 

07:46 given the above

what can we do in this 10-year time frame? what is the need for immediate change

in academic world or enough of the academic world to make a difference

07:56

So first on my list is that sustainability and human medicine need to become equal things within the

university sector-- at most major research universities there are

medical schools have massive facilities and massive investments and massive national

investments -in u.s alone 40 billion invested a year from the national institutes of health and the

billions invested a year through the hospital operations of the of the research grade medical schools uh

08:28

looking at you know one of the most significant scientific undertaking humans have ever

embarked on and while not asking for the diminishment of those

we need to somehow realize that the health and well-being of the relationship between the

humans and our ecosystems on which we're dependent and the sustainability of that

is the success of the individual human and

human medicine perspective and so number 1 we need to change the status of sustainability, sustainability outcomes, sustainability science and so forth dramatically within the university hierarchy

 

9.20 second a need for immediate change in the next 10 years within universities

and that is sustainability needs to become an area of new unifying intellectual  activity

 

what i call: an outcome science-you know

we have no problem suggesting that we have an outcome science in medicine

we have no problem suggesting that we have an outcome science in public health

09:44

but somehow for lots of reasons: political reasons, economic reasons, laziness within the universities lack of intellectual energy, lack of creativity we've not found a way to do this relative to sustainability so i'm

arguing that a second thing that we need to do is we need to make sustainability an acceptable

outcome-oriented science

which is not with less than a curiosity driven science not less than an engineering technology or science

area but has the same kind of status in our institutions

10:16

third in terms of change within the ten years and this is something that we may end up having to learn the hard way-you know the fact that we already have the 1.5 degrees Celsius uh temperature change for the earth, already pretty much locked in other more dramatic changes going forward in terms of the way thing

are working it's clear to me that university class speeds are too slow we're evolving too slowly

10:44

this is not a normal thing this is not a normal era= we need to speed up the clock speeds of

universities in terms of their intellectual organization their integration  unifying intellectual  sciences

around sustainability the notion of launching uh medical level efforts related to sustainability all

more quickly as well as finding out how to communicate our results more quicklyand not only through academic outlets

 

11.15 the fourth thing that is a need for immediate change is the university's success metrics so

all the league tables all over the world about this university is great and this

university is almost great and this university was great and this university

could be great and this university doesn't know what great means -uh to some

extent those are in fact to a large extent most of those measures are

input measures and then a few output measures but none of them

impact measures and so one of the things that we need in the next 10 years is to

change universities around the notion of their success metrics

11:46

we need to measure at least those universities willing to be measured

on their impact on their communities related to sdgs related to economic

progress related to socio-economic uh fairness and egalitarian access to

socio-economic progress

 

we need to measure universities on whether affecting the environmental

outcomes now people say run at universities how can we be responsible

 

well how can we not be responsible if theory after theory after theory and

model after model after model and no public body is working rapidly enough to implement

them then there must be something wrong with the message that comes with

the model or model is not easily able to be implemented in a

political sense at least in certain kinds of democracies or really complicated

 democratic institutions and so another thing that we should be measuring

: are we advancing the social learning capacity of the general population

to be able to deal with the complexities that global climate change and

sustainability sense

12:52

So in summary i'll tell you that we take this at arizona state university to be

 truly a part of our central reason for existence

we just upgraded the  julianne Wrigley global institute of sustainability

13:07

we're calling it this laboratory in the spirit of the national laboratory or

global laboratories that should be built around something other than

weapons of mass destruction which is the case in the united states for many of

our national laboratories or other things that are  not

representative of securing the totality of our success going forward into the future

13:28

and so we've launched the global laboratory building hundreds of millions of dollars of new facilities we've launched a new global future college with a school of sustainability the first in the united

states already there school on social innovation and social impact integrated around a new school

on complexity- all of those together and so for us-what we theme of our institution

central raison d’etre -

and so  let's understand who's responsible for this poor set of sdg outcomes as any other set of

institutions we've got 400 years of being inadequate to what we need and the

universities need to step up in  very fast and 10 years is going to be

in 10 years we've got completely modified institutions at least at some

universities- any questions?

==========================

At least 100 reasons can demonstrate the education crisis unting the younger half of the world- most livelihoods of the sdg generation will depend on education systems that end standard examination as the core mechanism of education from 6 to 18 to college graduation 22.

 urgent sdg challenges/leapfrog to humanising ai and 2020s tech makes this clearer than ever though I contributed to the1984 book the 2025 where economists rehearsed these exponential timeliness;

 development banks that first experimented with mobile devices for the poor soon made this a clarion call as did the Eeducation commission of un envoy Gordon brown after the first student year of the sdgs 2015-6 

 Coalitiions forming new universities shaping local to global sdg solitions and humanizing ai can be benchmarked 

 unga75 was timely for Crow’s Arizona state uni Plenary 1, University Leadership for the Decade of Action03:00 – 04:00 UTC |  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6Bwtrg9IpDnypQ7t_jjAYQ The session will showcase innovative approaches that universities in the Asia/Pacific region are implementing to increase their societal value and impact on the SDGs, as well as the challenges and opportunities to accelerate these actions and make them part of a new “business-as-usual” for universities. The session is partially in response to the challenge made by President Mike Crow of Arizona State University at a recent event of the UN Higher Education Sustainability Initiative, that universities need to change the way they operate and be more connected to the community to have real impact. 

 Abed’s brac uni Other coalition members of open sociey network including the 21st c arts uni of Bard ny state, the Vienna education networks inspired by ban ki-moon and soros; 

The ai for etchics global scholars of schwarzman unitin oxford with the 2 engineees universities with contental Impact boston’s mit and Beijing’s tsinghua

 The xprize innovation competitions of singular university in silicon valley See li ka shing’s contributions to universities 

 As we profile educators who empower youth to humanize ai we see that the changes college alumni Need apply to high school alumni and can be rooted as early as what engineering experimnts we help 6 year olds play with – see the 20 year learning curve of the man who designed Carnegie melons campus in silicon valley, then its online campus, now engineering experiences for 6 year ods Indian who designed Carnegie melon online out of valley 20 years ago..

 See the origin of Carnegie mellon https://www.cmu.edu/50/founder-stories/story-carnegie-and-mellon.html -also look at how Stanford and mit started up Different teaching virtual and project no need classrorm Now doing engineering curriculum age 6 

 ai for all Ai ibm xprize- semifinalists www.xprize.org/prizes/artificial-intelligence/teams 

 Go inspect roosevel island fusion of a cornell university campus and the 2nd hq of the 400000 it Consultants of india’s tata group

when you look at tech wizards most famous in uniting their regions ai- look at what university coalitions support them or whether their own alumni networks driven by urgent convergence of disciplines reform in zoom age in ways no separate university can plan