Sustainable University – Concept and Conception

Abstract

“Sustainable University” is a kind of phrase to emanate a semantic scent with connotations – traced back to an ages-old polarity, yet always at great fashion in social affairs – seemingly both conservative and progressive. Really? Can we so frivolously mix polarities, opposites, antinomies? Well, let’s see. We are talking about conservatism because university and sustainability are involved in activating if not an “instinct”, at least a “rationale” for preserving/perpetuating the knowledge within people and the resources needed to make it work. As we are also talking about progressivism because both try to do it not in ankylosis, but in advancing such knowledge (i.e., in economics, on the allocation of scarce resources) across generations, and the society learns to evolve through each and every member, who is educated to evaluate. Conservation and progress can work together. Before we return to this polarity that grinds, for an enduring while, both the profound and profane spirits, we can gloss over a double duality. The “sustainable university” is a concept that can be conceived in a “double-crossing” manner (here not used in a duplicitous sense, but reading the syntagma starting from each of the two ends of that pair of terms), whilst “there are as many opinions as there are heads” (“Quot capita tot sententiae/sensus” – as in the human head even the most objective representations can be moulded upon the utmost subjectivity with which people picture things in foro interno: “one way or another”). Hence, for the reader who has not yet lost patience with this exercise of terminological forensics (yet specific to the university world), let us “break the concept down to (doubly dual) pieces”

Keywords

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