Hi Nick,
The channels and media are a given .... blogs letters, twitter,
facebook, the lot.
All posts to Best Thinking and (your) Global Circle go out to the
world via both Facebook and Twitter.
And their links can be sent out in letters and emails. That's the easy bit.
The key thing for the campaign is to pick some key target actions and
messages to communicate via those challenges. ie it's more than
awareness of the need for "academic wisdom" it's some more tangible
events, actions, points, messages.
For Lee (and David M) - that focus is "rethinking money"
For me - it's wiser "governance" decision-making models.
All related of course, accounting lies behind most decisions. Which is
most fundamental to you depends on your perspective, but the point is
they are all valid messages worth communicating, and we should choose
and refine some messages to focus on, build the story, choose the
hashtags, the names of the steps on the road-map to the overall
changes we want to achieve. Behind the headlines soundbites there
needs to be the content at the linked blog / web-pages.
Regards
Ian
On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 9:46 AM, Maxwell, Nicholas
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Friend of Wisdom,
>
>
>
> You, like me, hold that the world is
> heading towards disaster: global warming, population growth, vast
> inequalities of wealth and power around the world, lethal character of
> modern war, destruction of natural habitats and extinction of species,
> pollution of earth, sea and air. You, like me, hold that these current and
> impending disasters have been made possible, even caused, by modern science
> and technology. The basic fault is a kind of academic inquiry (devoted to
> the pursuit of knowledge) damagingly irrational, in a structural way, when
> judged from the standpoint of helping to promote human welfare. As far as
> the long-term interests of humanity are concerned there can scarcely be a
> more important task than to correct the gross defects of academia, and put
> something like wisdom-inquiry into practice so that humanity may come to
> have what it so urgently needs: institutions of learning rationally designed
> and devoted to helping us make progress towards as good and wise a world as
> possible.
>
>
>
> Climate change is perhaps the most
> striking example of the urgency of the need for academic change. Academia
> ought to have generated sustained discussion in the public domain as to what
> humanity ought to be doing to bring down CO2 emissions as rapidly as
> possible. But we are still stuck in the rut of discussing whether or not we
> are causing global warming, and how seriously we should take it. Academia,
> devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, seems to be incapable of taking an
> active role in creating serious discussion of policies in the public domain
> – even when the future of civilization may be at issue.
>
>
>
> If all this is correct – and if not,
> where does it go wrong? – then it becomes a matter of great urgency to get a
> campaign going to alert scientists, academics, the public, the media, even
> politicians, about the urgent need to transform universities so that they
> begin to put wisdom-inquiry into practice.
>
>
>
> How might such a campaign be initiated?
> What steps might be taken in an attempt to get such a campaign underway?
> What might Friends of Wisdom do? Might we as, potentially, a campaigning
> organization, write letters to newspapers, post talks on You Tube outlining
> the argument, write to influential scientists and academics who might be
> sympathetic? Do we take to twitter? Do we spell out the message on
> Facebook and LinkedIn? Do we talk to colleagues about the matter? Do we
> email vice-president of universities around the world? Do we find some way
> of alerting students to the situation?
>
>
>
> It would be very interesting, and it
> might even be helpful, to have suggestions as to what such a campaign might
> do to spread awareness, at least, of the urgent need to transform academia.
>
>
>
> Best wishes,
>
>
>
> Nick Maxwell
>
> Website: www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom
> Publications online: http://philpapers.org/profile/17092
> http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/view/people/ANMAX22.date.html
>
>
|