ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes and integrates some of our main arguments and observations, while simultaneously considering the growing focus on the need to make universities more sustainable in an environmental sense. We explain why we see all these topics as entwined. We pursue two main concerns in this chapter. First, we turn to unsustainabilities in academic cultures and university governance. This includes the epistemic politics of disciplines and some deficiencies in academic citizenship. We interrogate the compulsory and compulsive corporatizing and bureaucratizing of the last 50 years, along with their obsessive metric monitoring and attendant factionalizing of resources among those in control, showing how the entire apparatus is simultaneously unsustainable and cannot address sustainability. We show some ways that university governance is moderated informally by the two binary cultures of administrators and academics with the primary control coming from the administrators, but sometimes strategically contained by the academics. Second, we raise some issues regarding the role of universities in the transnational traffic in knowledge and changes in the ecology of knowledge making that we have experienced. We also discuss some consequences of these changes with respect to knowledge flows related to climate and the environment. At the end, we discuss how the book intervenes in debates in the fields of critical university studies and STS.
