Ch.21 Fall 2031, New Colleges as a “new values habitat for humanity”

Chapter 21 serializing Insight Colleges, how Women In Congress re-invented liberal arts college curriculum and teaching methods to produce graduates capable of redeeming-restoring SpaceShip Earth.

After expressing what they do NOT WANT, the New College Committee finds it easier to express WHAT WE DO WANT. Momentum builds.

Women in Congress (WinC), and the work group they had delegated New College project to, had accepted re-conceiving liberal arts colleges from the ground up. The journey of 1,000 miles had taken its hardest, first step.

As preparations for New Colleges got under weigh and more staff were hired, the idea of New Colleges as a “new values habitat for humanity” became the meme of the moment. For thoughtful women, truly human values were more real than physical building materials.

Where old male-thinking college leaders invested their attention into endowments, real estate value of their physical plant, sports teams, they lost track of a great number of Best Practices being innovated in multiple fields. Liberal arts colleges, which could have been, were assumed to function, as mainstream culture’s connecting bridges to a positive future — the bridges were collapsing. Later historians were clear. By turning their backs on Best Practice innovations in group process, conflict resolution; and, interpersonal competency, male leaders of colleges; as well, many other businesses run like corporations, were doomed. This was why colleges were “circling the drain.”

When asked by facilitator Sarah Peyton, “What is it you DO NOT want in New Colleges?” women’s anger began to spill out. Women said, “We know what a LACK of healthy values feels like. Putting profit and shareholder dividends at the center instead of truly human values, is how men led SpaceShip Earth to crash and burn!”

We DO NOT WANT:

- Intolerance, bashing of women, men, minorities, children, anyone,

- Gilded Age extreme inequality,

- Further destruction of public commons, and

- Politics based on elite male domination-competition.

The hollowness we feel at the center of our lives, tracks back to:

- a lack of deepest-innermost values,

- disconnection from our own deepest-innermost values.

The need to connect — regularly — with our own deepest, innermost values, and find like-minded others to share with, can be satisfied only with a combination of solo activity and group fellowship.

How do make New Colleges into a spaces where young minds are invited, encouraged and supported to do this?

Women In Congress whose job it was to move New Colleges forward had taken the first step: “We will try, we will do our best, we will ask for all the support needed.” Yet they had little forward momentum, little forward oomph.

What was missing? Consensus on HOW to move forward, shared consensus in the group tasked with “doing something.”

What they were missing was the new, more modern definition of consensus.

Good enuf, safe enuf to try

WinC had initiated sponsored and executive produced almost ten year of annual Women’s Summer Conferences (WSCs). This required endless hours of groups working towards making decisions with consensus behind them. Similarly, WinC had initiated, drafted, reconciled, voted and passed four rounds of Green New Deals, #1, #2, #3, #4. Most all the provisions of GNDs started as “good ideas” at WSCs, some proposed by audience members. These were then worked with in face to face small groups. By the end of each Conference, many provisions had draft language ready to be taken into committee and turned into bills in the Fall legislative session. So Women were no strangers to how to create and sustain consensus.

However, re-making colleges was not taxing “socially unnecessary” advertising and reining in mafia-monopolistic behavior by tech giants. Re-making colleges was more like asking a desktop computer; or, a robot, to re-make its own operating system. How can it? It’s a creature of habits, habitual arrangements of ones and zeroes, millions of them. Whee do you start making it better? What does “better” even look like? This is how the earliest New Colleges task groups were baffled.

As often happened, Monday Lunch With Experts provided needed insights and keys. The key was unanimous consensus is not required. That’s a male-competition, King of Hill idea. Most group consensus is NOT unanimous Dictators get 100% unanimous consensus. If you tolerate diversity and individuality, human groups rarely achieve unanimity

The new goal for group consensus is, “Is this proposal good enuf to try? Safe enuf to try?” That’s all. Most group decisions require a leap of faith of some size. This is natural.

What if I don’t like the majority consensus? Individuals with different convictions are asked this: Do you feel strongly enuf about your objections, to block majority consensus — or not? What’s natural, is most individuals do not feel strongly enuf to “fight to the death.” They are more likely to be willing to abstain and not block the considered direction the majority is moving in.

If an individual feels strongly enuf to “fight to the death” to alert the majority to an error in their perceiving, they can be given a short second hearing. Maybe some crucial point has indeed been overlooked. If a panel agrees the objection has merit, the point can be incorporated and consensus re-done. If the panel holds the objection as without significant merit, if asked politely, the objector is likely to not block the majority consensus.

After Sarah Peyton facilitated women to first voice what they did NOT want, it was clearer to women to voice what they DID WANT.

What we DO WANT in New Colleges

A large summer conference was NOT the appropriate venue to work out these issues. This was more internal work WinC had to do among the women who wished to be actively invited in remaking colleges. Tho New Colleges was a Congressional project, many, not all meetings were open to observers Sometimes Q&A was permitted. All media was strictly DIS-invited. This was an internal process, a process of looking and listening within for what was true and singing in the heart.

Discussions were often about values:

- which values to encourage in future graduates,

- which old-male values to discourage and deconstruct, and

- Who benefits from promoting this value?

The biggest “Big Rock”

One “big rock” the college group had strong consensus on was an insight from Waldorf high schools, adapted to colleges: “Students are drowning in information. Shoving more information into students, is a faulty goal for colleges. Curriculum and teaching need to provide each student their own tool set for composing and constructing, their own map of the world; towards where, they planned to go after college and in future self-re-inventions They will set new, different goals multiple times. Prepare them with the inner coherency and information gathering skills, to navigate the upheavals life throws at us.”

Nurturing new healthy leaders

We want colleges active about identifying and nurturing leadership talent in the student body.

Traditional colleges are mostly passive about identifying and nurturing leadership talent in the student body. Most leadership positions are either voluntary or are elected positions. WinC guessed this passive approach to leadership development would fail in the early years of New Colleges. Identifying and nurturing female leadership talent would have to be both more subtle and more pro-active. However as much as possible, the goal was to draw out natural leadership talent, not impose it from above, as happens in male-led military orgs.

Women accepted there is no one best style of leader; how many styles of leadership exist and are useful in different orgs. What eventually worked was a quarterly informal meeting at each college for each grade level, of faculty interested in being leadership talent scouts.

Once identified, female students, and much less often, male students, were informally invited to do two things in class. They were invited to be back-up volunteers for various exercise demonstrations if no one else volunteered; and, they were asked to be ready to read their writing to the class for comment when no one else volunteered. This supported classroom facilitators (teachers) to keep lessons moving in face of student reluctance.

The subtle connotations of “teacher’s pet” here were of concern. This is why it was unofficial. As well others could ask for this privilege, take it on and see how they did with it. As you imagine, from time to time, jealousy around this dynamic could arise and then this too had to become a learning experience.

For hiring purposes, worker-owned business and resident-owned communities often looked for evidence of leadership behavior and experiences on resumes.

Indigenous wisdom for New Colleges

New Colleges Project Core Committee was very aware of advocates for “indigenous people’s values.”

They wished to enfold and bring these people into the New Colleges Project. Two of the five pilot program campuses were planned to be ethnically oriented It was hoped one pilot program campus could be a historically black college, a second pilot program campus a Native American or Muslim community campus.

What about potential conflict between indigenous values and modern values? New Colleges took a compassionate, neutral position wherever possible: They encouraged bridging gaps between stakeholders by focussing on the benefits of higher education for women regardless of origin.

The Core Committee had internal consensus on two beliefs here. It was not indigenous people’s wisdom per se which was valuable to women. It was exercise of critical-independent thinking, over and over, which benefitted women, benefitted everyone, to progress from Sheeple to citizens.

Second, Core Committee believed, as Waldorf-method schools worldwide had demonstrated since the 1980s, curriculum and methods honoring universal child-development patterns and needs easily adapted to local culture and local fairy tales, crafts, traditions and holidays.

So while indigenous women per se were prominent in the Project from the start; and, remained prominent, it was educated women, more than indigenous women per se, who set SpaceShip Earth back on course.

Creating and honoring the inwardly sacred

Your inner sacred space is an interior space words point to yet cannot live in, a space where you hold what is sacred to you — and — it holds you.

For persons already comfortable with meditation and spiritual exercises, what is sacred to you, tends to beyond words, above words, higher, more expansive than mere mentalizing. Many teachers say if a sacred experience comes to you, be slow to share it with others. Extract all the nourishing juice of it for your own self first. Why? The sacred rarely travels well in conversation with others because each person experience of the sacred is highly unique. Each person hungers for their own experience of the sacred. Only with great kindness and great empathy is sharing your experience likely to nourish other people.

Women determine to fix the leadership drought

One mandate Women put in writing for the College Committee was to address the drought of progressive leaders. The Committee was tasked with producing graduates who were more more able to function well on a team; or, when needed, to lead a team.

No more againstness

Males united people thru againstness. “Greed” was “againstness” disguised, againstness towards the highest good for ALL stakeholders concerned.

The recruiting posters for WW I advertised for soldiers to fight against the Huns. Recruiting posters for WW II advertised for soldiers to fight against the Nazis and Japs. The way conflict was conceived of by Progressives between 1930–2022 was entirely based on “us vs. them” polarities, many variations on this:

- Public elections conceived of as sports, as “horse-races,” in win~lose terms,

- Civil rights as race agains race, class against class,

- Single-issue politics: anti-Vietnam, anti-war, anti-nuclear, and so on.

However, attempts to unite people thru againstness is typical, short-term male win~lose thinking.

Synergy: when 2 + 2 = 5

“The society with high synergy is one in which virtue pays.” — Abraham Maslow

Synergy is when people combine their energies to create something greater than they could achieve alone. Like every quality, “synergy” is a two-edged sword:

Positive Synergy occurs when people converge their best qualities — such as caring, strengths and creativity. When they do, they can produce positive, win-win negotiations and peak performance in workgroups.

Negative Synergy occurs when people trigger each other’s worst qualities. Married couples fighting is perhaps the classic example. More subtly when intolerance of difference, small-mindedness and ignorance converge, this produces win-lose or lose-lose thinking, outcomes where no one is happy and group performance declines.

Since the 1970s, the word “synergy” is used in business, sports and other areas where people combine talents. The meme tracks back to anthropologist Ruth Benedict. She emphasized synergy after studying various cultures for her books, such as, Patterns of Culture. Her work on this topic from the 1930s-late 1940s was highlighted by Abraham Maslow.

Maslow moved on from his work on self-actualizing individuals, to focus on how to create and sustain healthy group process in groups, organizations and societies. “Synergy” became a way to talk about this. Maslow reminding people of Ruth Benedict’s studies of various societies. Writing in the 1960s, he described her views of high and low synergy:

Benedict’s Concept of High Synergy

A high synergy group or society occurs where the interests of both individuals and the interests of the group as a whole, are acknowledged and honored. This produces healthy group process.

Benedict’s Concept of Low Synergy

A low synergy group or society occurs where the interests of individuals and the interests of the group oppose each other, are in opposition. This produces unhealthy group process.

Benedict’s views thru Maslow led to books such as Douglas McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise (1960) and Frederick Herzberg’s Work and the Nature of Man (1966). This was the modern beginning of common rhetoric for group synergy and healthy group process.

The most exciting groups always result from a mutually respectful marriage between an able leader and an assemblage of extraordinary people.

Groups become great only when everyone in them, leaders and members alike, are:

- Free to do his or her best work, and

- Made aware of and accountable to, their obligations to each other and to the group as a whole.

In this way effective teams with effective leaders facilitate each other’s growth.

Reference: Warren Bennis, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration.

Colleges as a “public commons”

Cultural Creative women speaking at Monday Lunch With Experts advocated conceiving of colleges as a valuable public commons for 18–30 year olds. Most college-educated people understood what a “public commons” was. This way of framing colleges would take stress off the scary “unknowns” of “redeeming” and “re-making” colleges, as if starting with bare, scorched earth.

Could this be done? Could it be workable-sustainable? Across all classes? Beneficial for the next seven generations? At what cost?

New Colleges core curriculum Mandate

The thinking was re-making both core course content and teaching methods was necessary. Concerning course content:

- Competitive sports are to be made into cooperative-collaborative games.

- Content of college History-Sociology is to be remade. Blueprint of WE is to be taught as hands-on Sociology in relevant classrooms.

- The content of college Psychology-Sociology-Public Speaking is to be remade into “Communications.” Teaching methods here are to be remade into live, social, fun classroom interaction sequences on topics of interpersonal competency and exposing learners to Best Practices in group process.

- “Goethean Holistic Science” is to be taught as the philosophy of science.

What about science, technology, math courses (STEM)? These were considered more as workplace competency training. If employers wished to guide Federal and State legislators about what to teach and pay for buildings and faculty salaries, Women In Congress were all for this. What the women wanted to end was corporate welfare in the form of free training of college students who then are hired by corporations, who then employ fresh blood to make new useless Frankenstein monsters, causing more destruction for Women to clean up after.

Now women were ready for a New Colleges War Room.