Conclusion

Paris, May 2019: it was a late Friday afternoon and I was in Paris to attend the first meeting of the Scientific Committee of the Campus de la Transition ¹ (referred to by those involved as ‘the Campus’). We met in a small seminar room in the famous Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) where Algerian-born French philosopher of postmodernism Jacques Derrida used to teach. With various others beamed in via Zoom, we were there to discuss the educational programme of the Campus. The Campus is located in a large French Chateau (with 40 rooms and nine classrooms) located just south of Paris. Donated by the Catholic Church to a mixed group of Jesuits, academics and activists, the vision is to create something similar to the SI in South Africa and the Schumacher College in the United Kingdom. They took over the Chateau in early 2018. I was stunned when the chair of the committee, a professor at EHESS, opened the meeting by saying that their reason for initiating the Campus was to create a space for alternative education programmes that could not be introduced from within the French Universities. “We have tried, and failed”, he said. The subsequent conversation was infused by a shared sense that the pent-up demand for inter- and transdisciplinary sustainability-oriented education expressed by young people hungry to understand the state of the world could not be delivered from within some of the most prestigious universities in the world. Without this, I thought to myself, the full potential of the age of sustainability cannot be realized. Inevitably, many more initiatives like the SI, Schumacher College and the Campus de la Transition will emerge (see case studies in Gravata, Piza, Mayumi and Shimhara, 2013).