Earlier this year, the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) released a publication called Boldly Sustainable: Hope and Opportunity for Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change.  Written by Peter Bardaglio, senior fellow at Second Nature, and Andrea Putnam, Director of Sustainability Financing at Second Nature, the book provides a compelling argument for colleges and universities to fully explore the opportunities and business implications of pursuing sustainable business models and integrating the topic of sustainability as a core component of student curriculums.

The book begins by outlining sustainability initiatives to date including the Kyoto Protocol and the subsequent discussions currently underway for the drafting of another version of that agreement as well as the history and efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) among others.  The authors contend that colleges and universities are uniquely positioned to make a significant impact in the global struggle to address climate change.  Quoting President John Adams’ statement that “’There are two types of education.  One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live,’” Bardaglio and Putnam argue that not only does the pursuit of sustainability in college curriculums and business practices make good financial sense, it is an imperative if institutions are to educate students for the social challenges they will certainly face upon graduation.

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While I have listed the gapingvoid blog as one of the websites that I visit, I doubt that many readers have visited the site.  Hugh MacLeod, the author of that site, is a marketer.  He has a hobby/profession as a cartoonist and usually illustrates those cartoons on the back of business cards, publishing them on his blog.

MacLeod has taken excerpts from some of his pithiest writings and illustrations from his blog and published a book, Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, with his thoughts about creativity.  The concepts are MacLeod’s and expressed in his direct, earthy style.  The book is easy to read, totaling 40 chapters and 159 pages.  While I read the entire book, the chapters that I liked the most were:

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Alan Paton wrote Cry, the Beloved Country about his native country, South Africa, in 1946.  In the 60 plus years since, it has become a classic.  When I was an undergraduate at Duke in the 1970’s, this book was required reading in a class that I did not have to take.  In preparation for a trip to South Africa this month, I recently read it for the first time. The book creates a narrative about the sequence of events in the later life of Reverend Stephen Kumalo, a black, native South African who lives in Ndotsheni, Natal, an area of South Africa.  In Kumalo’s Natal, many residents have left for jobs in the mines or in Johannesburg.  As the population of the tribes has increased, the land given to them through various means has been insufficient to support the younger generations.  In fact, the land of South Africa is an engaging theme throughout the novel.  In Kumalo’s world, Johannesburg has grown into a major metropolis with all the benefits and detriments of a big city.  As the largest city in South Africa, it is on the front of the increasing conflicts between the governing and minority white population and the majority black African population.

The time, the people, and the events that Kumalo encounters on the trip comprise the richness of this book.  Kumalo leaves Natal for a trip to Johannesburg to find his sister, Gertrude.  He finds her only to discover that she is not physically sick but has become a prostitute and bootlegger.  He finds his brother, John, and discovers that he has become a leader of the black movement for freedom, while cautiously being more of an orator than an open law-breaker.  He finds his son, Absalom, after Absalom has been arrested for the murder of a prominent white engineer, Arthur Jarvis, who has been leading the national discussion about freeing the blacks.

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While reading a few papers about learning communities, I came across a reference to a publication by James Zull, entitled The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning.  Zull, a professor of biology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, is also the Director Emeritus of its University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE).  He states that his quest to explain why people learn differently and how teachers should teach to accommodate those differences led him to write this book explaining some of the physical characteristics of the human brain and how those characteristics influence our learning.

Zull combines a subject that to many might be dull (physical characteristics of the brain) with his personal experiences as a teacher and uses examples of students that he taught to illustrate his concepts.  His primary message in the book is that learning is change and “thus, the art of teaching must be the art of changing the brain.”  Zull deliberately does not define “learning” since he says that it has different meanings for all of us and he challenges the reader to review his book and see if the physical explanations of learning fit within their definitions of learning.

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Every now and then, I run across a good book that has been out for a while and which escaped my attention.  Such was the case with David Maraniss‘ They Marched into Sunlight which was published in 2003.

Maraniss, an editor at the Washington Post, crafted an excellent non-fiction book which is actually two stories with the crescendo event of both occurring in the October 17-18, 1967 two-day period.  Storyline number one is about an ambush of two companies of the Black Lion battalion in Vietnam.  As the Vietnam War continued to escalate, General Westmoreland and the Pentagon were under pressure to bring back better news, and President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) was under fire from conservatives and liberals as well as the radicals against war.  Storyline number two is about students at the University of Wisconsin who led a sit-in against recruiters from Dow Chemical, manufacturers of napalm, and a favorite target of anti-war elements across the nation.

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I bought the first version of the book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, which was written by Chip and Dan Heath and published in 2007.  I just read on the authors’ blog that the new version is available which essentially adds a chapter and some additional 30 pages of content.

Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.  Dan Heath is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education and is a co-founder of Thinkwell, an enterprise dedicated to figuring out how to build a textbook without text but with using videos and other technologies.  Chip’s research led him to wonder why urban legends and conspiracy theories had a way of spreading around socially, “sticking” so to speak.  Dan’s research at Thinkwell led him to conclude that the best professors and lecturers had a similar way of conveying the point to their students and classes.  Being brothers with a keen interest in education, the two decided to write and publish this book.

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