Universities Have a Sustainability Problem
5th September 2022
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)—the most cited academic work across the humanities and social sciences in the 1970s—Thomas Kuhn claims that most academic work consists of puzzle solving. Researchers make incremental advances on well-defined problems within a discipline or sub-discipline. It’s rare for a thinker to successfully contest the underlying assumptions of an entire research program. Only the likes of Einstein or Crick and Watson break paradigms and reorient the research of entire fields.
Kuhn’s account, however, assumes the disciplinary prerogatives of the university. He doesn’t raise the possibility of a more fundamental type of disruption where the basic premises of knowledge production are questioned. But of course, knowledge has different functions at different times, as societies develop new priorities in response to new challenges. In this more-than-disciplinary sense we may ask whether the modern research university is structured to help us create a sustainable society.