Boundaries of critique

I’ve been trying to make arguments for changing courses, changing education degree programmes and changing priorities at my university for several years. As I’ve done so, I’ve gradually come to understand that there are more and less meaningful, more or less impactful, changes that can be attempted. The way I’m thinking about this right now is that at each level in an organisation, there are some fundamental stories about the purpose for the activities we engage in. Suggestions for changes that validate those stories can be tolerated. The fundamental stories allow some room for changes, but only if they are limited enough to be harmless. Once those changes directly challenge the stories that underpin the organisational unit against which critique is levelled (a course, degree programme or a university), that critique has little chance of succeeding. And it’s not for the lack of power in an argument, it’s simply because there are forces at play that individual actors might be powerless to act against. Let me explain.

In a course, an examiner might have determined that there is a problem in that students have no connection to real-world affairs in their course on software design. There might be practical reasons why this is so, and perfectly valid arguments for keeping the organisation of a course. After all, it’s much easier to conduct teaching with well-defined outcomes if the environment in which learning is supposed to happen is well controlled. If there are more degrees of freedom, there will be more issues to control, which incurs a cost on the part of the course responsible. There are external actors to engage, other teachers, administrative tasks in how to ensure all groups get the same treatment, and so on. However, there might also be opportunities for students to experience real-world issues and see that their profession can be a real cause for concern. Social media companies directly contribute to social tensions, polarisation and mistrust through their design. The simple solution to “the problem” might involve just giving a lecture with some examples of how to apply their skills judiciously and selectively as professionals, with models that describe how to ask questions about hypothetical effects of a design. One might even require students to participate in a workshop on eliciting such long-term effects. However, if there are clients who simply want something built, and students want to build a system, need to build the system clients want to get their credits, there’s really not much point in asking overly critical questions. The only critical questions you could ask are those that would lead to either (a) justifying decisions already made, or (b) concern so outlandish risks, or concern decisions taken elsewhere that you can safely ignore them for your design. Either way, the critique has a clear boundary: the course must still result in a system being built, with the customer in charge of the requirements.

In a degree programme, some might call for a progression of learning activities that build up to some core sustainability competencies. They may argue that such competencies allow students to become skilled at navigating real-world scenarios and handle problems of a more wicked nature. They may recognise that engineering students tend to become disengaged in social issues as a result of their studies, that they have lower empathy than others and would need to see problems that are not purely technical in nature. There are basically two types of changes that their critique could result in. However, much as in the case of a single course, there are strict boundaries on what changes are permissible within the scope of a degree programme. As an example of a permissible change, one might introduce the current unsustainable state of the world, provide simple technical solutions to environmental problems such as electrification of transport, have students work through examples of hypothetical effects of their designs and finally to reflect on the wider implications with their thesis work, by writing a section called “The work in a wider context”. However, if the programme would introduce students to the notion that the overall societal structures that spring from a growth-based technology-driven myth of progress are a cause for our current predicaments, that would invalidate the rationale for an engineering degree programme that values knowledge that specifically is selected to enable technologically-driven “progress”. Students selecting an engineering degree, and teachers who have specialised in a specific type of engineering, may consider it strange if such perspectives are engaged with, as they could question that core curriculum of an engineering degree programme. Students, seeking employments after graduation, and teachers, seeking to teach that which they know, and faculty, seeking to recruit and retain students based on their expectations, would all be rational in rejecting to include such issues in an engineering degree. They would reasonably state that what they engage in is engineering, and that engineering requires certain technical subjects, otherwise it wouldn’t be engineering. Although this is of course a circular argument (you could just ask “so what?” after all), the validity of the argument comes from the fact that all parties (students, faculty and employers) have an idea about what engineering is and why it’s taught the way it is. If you’d be critical of the notion that engineering as traditionally conceived is useful in addressing the problems caused by the primacy of technical and mathematical subjects, you’d be at odds with all those primary stakeholders and their ideas about valuable knowledge and progress.

As for a university, there may be some that want to make sure that sustainability is made a core concern for all degree programmes, mandatory even for those who would not see it as their core concern. They may push for more sustainability integration assessment. They might want to see that all degree programmes should be assessed using STARS, AISHE or something similar. Reports would be filled out, and surveys conducted. However, the core notion that a university education is still the most relevant means by which we can gain the skills we’d need to a societal transformation would go unchallenged. To say that academia is based on principles that undermine core principles for the transformation of society would be beyond the scope of any such enterprise. You’d hardly be welcomed by saying that

• academia is inherently valuing limited and theoretical over practical knowledge by virtue of the design of disciplines (thus favouring ideas that work exactly, but only in very circumscribed settings, rather than in society at large),
• conducting research validating previous work is more important than challenging core ideas (as it generates more citations within your fields),
• working within a discipline is more important than between disciplines (as it is a necessary requirement for career advancement), and that
• notions of knowledge exclusivity and ideas of superiority are endemic to academia (as it is necessary to be an academic professional to get research funding, and societal “partners” cannot easily get access to those funds even within research projects, or be recognised in the scientific community for their expertise).

These examples illustrate the core tension between critique that is superficial, harmless, and critique that challenges core notions in academia. Even superficial critique might fail to enact changes, but none of the more fundamental critiques would be likely to be included willingly by the system at which such critique is directed.

Within the scope of computing education, the kind of courses and skills that can be validated are those that contribute to producing computing professionals. The only changes permissible would be those that still rely on the same core set of skills in computational thinking and building computing systems, and harness those skills for other ends. There is a certain flexibility of any degree programme to allow outlier, “conscience courses” that confirm that the degree programme is a good programme.

For example, within the logic of computing education, we’re able to say that we need software engineering professionals that are capable of producing “sustainable software”. Producing such software still requires competent computing professionals, and seeing as how computing is deeply embedded within our current society, it would seem as if we’d need professionals in computing that are only reoriented to produce other types of software. However, we might see that our current predicaments need to be understood on their own terms, not filtered through the lens of a particular engineering discipline. And that, without any changes in our surrounding economic or political systems, or our underlying myths about the purposes of human activities in general, not much is likely to change just by considering the effects of a particular contemporary type of engineering.

If the rationale for building new computing systems is challenged, such a challenge is not commensurable with the idea that we should be training computing professionals as we see them today. If we see new computing systems as necessarily being run on computers that are never intended to be recycled, then should we contribute to their continued proliferation, putting ever more people and organisations at risk? If ever more complex IT infrastructure will incur an ever greater marginal cost on the organisations that are to use such infrastructure, should we prepare our graduates with skills and attitudes that direct them to produce more such systems? If systems that are produced are designed with business models in mind that are incompatible with a long-term sustainable society, how relevant is it to even talk about “sustainable computing”?

Moving one step away from computing, we might instead call for engineering in general to orient itself towards studying means of powering society through renewable energy systems and capturing carbon. We might call for a general realignment of engineering with the needs of society, to leverage the best of our craft for addressing the most pressing issues. However, if we review the options available for us in, say, drawing down carbon, we might find that nature-based solutions offer the greatest global potential for carbon reductions, the most synergy effects and lowest costs and risks compared to high-tech options for smart grids, 4G nuclear power and carbon capture technologies. And nature-based solutions rely less on feats of engineering and more on feats of biology and collaboration. We might similarly see that using less transportation in general, less technologically advanced means of food production, and more nature- and human-centered solutions to many of our problems are superior options.

As we move one step away from engineering, we could call for biomimicry & nature-based solutions as a reorientation for higher education in general, to offer degree programmes better aligned with the needs that arise given the predicaments we find ourselves in. However, those solutions might have to be based on the coordination and knowledge that exists in local communities, widely shared by most people, not based on highly specialised experts with narrow fields of expertise. Academia is intrinsically linked to ideas about specialisation, inertia, conformity and traditions, through the disciplines, career pathways and ranking indices used within those disciplines. Such ideas are at odds with needs for generalists with broad knowledge of local circumstances, who are grounded in local communities yet brave enough to propose changes to the way land, water and people should be organised. Who act more than write, and have local knowledge directly applicable to the problem of producing food, building a house or forging a working community, potentially capable of supporting a truly circular economy instead of writing a text such as this.

On a societal level, we could call for courses to learn about a circular economy in principle. Such courses might be useful if all it would take to change economic behaviour in society would be better knowledge about resource re-use, recycling and management, while continuing our general logic of a growth-based economy for the purpose of a welfare state and comfortable living. However, if we instead see that minimisation of resource and energy use are necessary in an energy-constrained future, that’s another matter. If we recognise that our current civilisation is based on a combination of abundant, free but toxic fossil energy, a value system centered on separateness through economic transactions, exploitation and superiority of some at the expense of others, that means more fundamental changes are needed for a societal transformation. If small-scale farming and local economies are part of the solutions we need, that would not necessarily lead to the preservation of the economy and our current welfare society as we now know it.

In each of these cases, there is a clear separation between the kinds of changes that would be permissible within the scope of the existing institutional framework and the kinds of changes that would challenge ideas underpinning such institutions.

Graduates and businesses alike expect degree programmes to be concerned with producing future employees of businesses that are currently successful. Changes possible are those that do not challenge the notion that a degree programme should increase the chances of being a productive member of an existing commercial enterprise. And likewise, the only changes permissible at the university level would be those that do not risk dropping prospective students, who want to secure their future as employables, and so on.

I say permissible because, there are always choices within a larger context for other actors to gain from not recognising the same long-term risks as you do. If there are other degree programmes better aligned with current business buzzwords than yours, there’s a very real risk they will attract more students. If your business is the first one to argue for keeping older IT systems, cutting costs and simplifying technical architectures, there’s a real risk others will earn more money by selling new systems, putting you out of business.

So, have I become the ultimate cynic? That no changes are ever possible, and the only recourse would be to yield and fall silent? Not quite. While I do not believe that any major social system will be capable of simply realising the unsustainable practices it builds on and spontaneously remodel itself at great risk for itself, there are still safe spaces to practice revolutionary mindsets. Those safe spaces are crucial for when there are external events that make change necessary. Then, and only then, will it be possible to talk more freely and directly about why we are in the situation we are in, and what current events mean for our future prospects. Only then will we have a chance to have meaningful conversations about hard choices. Only then can we choose between nursing or aggravating responses to tragedies and hardships as they unfold.