Ch15 What if we make a big mistake?
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
September 2030 ~
The leaders of Women In Congress were not ambitious; they were cautious about taking responsibility for re-making college. This is likely to be “a no-win, fool’s errand, likely to get us tarred and feathered,” they said.
In Fall, 2030, every woman In Congress lived with the question, “Could we take on re-making colleges? Dare we attempt this? How?” After Greta’s protests and after Summer Conference 2030, “colleges are dying” dogged the steps of every woman serving publicly. Under the weight of the obsolete male tropes it chose to operate under, adult education in the best of Western humanities, was dying. Vocational and technology colleges were unlikely to expand their humanities offerings significantly. The whole concept of “humanities” perhaps even “humanism” was in danger of not being passed on to future generations.
Some voices said, “Good riddance! Students need college like a fish needs a bicycle.” Indeed, some asked, “What’s the cost of doing nothing? Why don’t we simply allow liberal arts colleges to fail?
Given their roles as mothers and homemakers, women were not in the ideal position to decide if institutions dedicated to educating future generations in humanism should live or die. Still, no one else was around to make this determination Many women asked, “Why is this our task?” Such a massive, sudden and all-encompassing “meddling” in public education had never been attempted before.
This nagging question, forced many elected women to “hit the books,” catch up on the history of K-12 and college reform efforts, 1965–1995, starting with John Holt on un-schooling, The Way It’s Sposed to Be;” then, Alfie Kohn on the dangers of praise and rewards in schools. Then Student-Centered Language Arts and Reading K-13: A Handbook for Teachers by James Moffett and Betty Wagner was most helpful. After these, Waldorf-methods texts for parents and teachers pulled most of these Best Practices together into an organic whole: Teaching As a Lively Art (1985). Lastly, the Waldorf AWSNA textbook for administrators, The Art of Administration: Viewpoints on Professional Management in Waldorf Schools (2015 latest ed). This proved timely and relevant
Between July 2030 and June 2031, Women learned from expert educators at Monday Lunch, they listened to voters; and, they asked lots of questions. What was learned? Colleges needed their own Story of Restoration; they needed a new purpose to exist.
Q: Were professional college reformers useful?
A: Sadly, not much at all.
Why? They were primarily highly paid male consultants, technocrats. Such people are rarely able to perceive outside their own mental boxes. This was no band-aid situation. A new underlying purpose requires not a consultant, not a technocrat. it requires a visionary, courageous visionaries. Defining a new purpose for a large organization requires imagination, going out on multiple imaginary limbs simultaneously. Why? This is the only way to learn which limbs are sturdy; and, which are weak or rotten and need sawing off.
At Summer Conference 2030, a representative group of United States women asked elected Women In Congress, “Do you know enuf, do you have enuf resources and allies, to conceive of how colleges could be re-made? Do you dare? If you did dare, could you pull this off?”
Elected officials attending 2030 Conference looked at each other. They were neither ambitious nor anxious for the job of fixing liberal arts colleges. They didn’t want the job. It was a job bigger, more complex, than anything women collectively had ever attempted before:
- bigger than The Women’s Suffrage (voting for women) (1901),
- bigger than Women’s Temperance (anti-alcohol) 1873–1933,
- bigger than pro-abortion or anti-abortion issues (1980s-2035), and
- bigger than Women Against Gun Violence (1995–2024).
Who or what single body, was qualified to do this? Clearly NO single individual, NO single body, was qualified to do this.
Nov. 2030
Five months later, towards Christmas, women began to separate their grief over the loss of colleges from what they could DO about the problem. The paralysis of grief subsided. Women In Congress still feared making the wrong choice about colleges, making a big mistake. They still questioned their own ability to lead creatively in this crisis, “If we say ‘yes,’ are we over-reaching? Do we have enuf political experience to conceive of a pilot program likely to work and be sustainable?
College enrollments continued to plummet; colleges continued to merge. Male-created, neck-up-only colleges had not imagined, nor were they equipped, to start all over again. Colleges on the brink of failure came to Women In Congress for support. Yet, they were clueless about how to re-invent their purpose for existing.
In this way Women In Congress learned existing colleges were only skilled at self-perpetuation, not innovation. Colleges without visionary imagination were simply winding down, like wind-up toys who had lost their initial charge and no adults in the room to wind them up again. What surprised Women was how few college employees cared whether colleges disappeared or not. No one had the imagination to imagine a workable response to such a crisis; let alone, a feminine-inspired vision.
More questions than answers
After summer 2030, women who knew college consultants questioned them informally about failing colleges. The result? Women came away with more questions than answers:
- In history, who has tried anything similar? What can we learn from earlier successes and failures?
- How are you going put a new purpose under a Western Culture institution 1,000 years old? I’m glad that’s not my job!
- Are you going to re-make only college curriculum? What about relations between admin and faculty?
- Can you separate re-making colleges from re-making mainstream society? How will one affect the other? How will you even separate the issues?
- WHY do this? What do you really want? What’s your endgame if you succeed?
- Once you have an endgame, how easy will it be to explain and sell it to the public? Will they, can they catch your vision?
- Who wants to be the public face of this effort? Should this position have any perks or powers?
- How long will it take to compose a workable plan? How long will it take to stage a pilot program? How long will it take to go from pilot programs to multiple-site implementation?
- How much will it cost?
Women In Congress felt caught between a rock and hard place. Either colleges for the lower 90% of families disappear; or, Women take on the biggest, most challenging political-cultural project since perhaps the founding of the country.
The stuck place
Many were stuck here, “If we say “yes,” exactly HOW would we proceed?” The HOW eluded everyone. The potential To Do List was hundreds of items, overwhelming. The intellectual weight and complexity of the task made women’s heads hurt. Re-making core college courses alone was HUGE. Any attempt at re-making colleges could involve 1,000 or more people, multiple stakeholder interest groups, dozens of political issues. It was suicide — wasn’t it?
If women said “yes” to the task, who could tell them how to define “re-making colleges”?
Who are our collaborators?
Women knew if renewing colleges was attempted, it had to be a cooperative-collaborative joint effort, among multiple stakeholder interest groups. Many discarded Best Practices, never implemented, needed to be uncovered, dusted off, reviewed, collected and organized; so, they could be re-considered for re-making colleges. This would be a BIG effort requiring both time and staff. No one in political office since JFK and President Johnson, had thought this big.
For this to work, collaborating groups needed to be on the same page about:
- Team Human, Spaceship Earth values. How profitable colleges would be, how colleges would compete — all such male topics had to be be “put to sleep” for bigger cultural issues to be resolved first.
- If any healthy, like-minded males, wished to participate, they had to be included. A New Colleges pilot program, probably at the graduate level, was imagined to have a Male Gender Studies Dept. explicitly dedicated to the study, training and practice of how young males could be redeemed along whole-brain lines.
- “Don’t look back” ~ Bob Dylan. Prior to 2024, success at significant college reform was virtually zero. Oh, good ideas and attempts existed — they simply were shot down by male-led administrators. Even women-who-thought-like-men were convinced about King of the Hill, pyramid-structure-thinking, where power only flows from the top-down. Corrupting power corrupting absolutely.
The need was to turn a fresh page on college reform. Even more radical, the purpose of college reform had to be re-imagined.
After meeting with various college interest groups and unions, it was learned very few groups had values resonant with Women in Congress. In the end Women were told, “If you want it done, you better do it yourself.” The fable of the little red hen came to mind often.
dg-little red hen
Unwilling to go it alone, Women did they best they could to gather a brain trust of like-minded women and the few remaining males subscribed to healthy feminine values. From this contact list would come the initial committees and task forces to do the work. Women In Congress gave themselves until early spring 2032 to come up with an Executive Summary of their Plan, no more than five pages, which could be made public.
Women In Congress had not yet fallen on their face publicly. Still they feared re-making colleges could become their Waterloo. Other Women said, “Once we start, there’s no turning back from a complete make-over. How can we stop half-way?” To take this on would be attempting their biggest swing yet at positive cultural change-making. What if it was — a-swing-and-a-miss?
Many women were excited about “going all the way” — yet — had no clear images of what the endgame looked like. Would women repeat the male error, make another, different, one-sided Frankenstein monster?
College topics dominated the cultural landscape for the next seven years and the next seven Summer Conferences.
Public statement of Christmas, 2030
“. . . Women In Congress has made no commitment to either abandon liberal arts colleges; nor, to take on the task of re-making colleges from the ground up. We’re not there yet.
What we ARE ready to do is to prepare the ground so these considerations can evolve further. We are funding one or more public town hall meeting, in all 50 states to listen to how people feel about colleges and their ideas of what can and should be done. We want to hear from all stakeholders. We want stakeholders to listen to each other. We want respectful debate. Any consensus which emerges will be useful. ‘Cream will rise to the top. . . .”
