* Paul Wildman
Fellow in Futures Studies, International Management Centres,
Pacific Region (Brisbane)
PO Box 74 Nundah Brisbane 4014 Australia
Ph/Fax +61 7 32667570 
email   pwildman@powerup.com.au
home page    http://www.powerup.com.au/~pwildman

ABSTRACT  

FROM MAKING THE MEANING TO MANAGING MEANINGS  

Historically the university followed on from the monastery, that is, one way of knowing God became one way of knowing: a Uni(1)versity. This one way of knowing seems to remain for the West as the empirical system with its belief in big ‘T’ truth and objective reality. Other ways of knowing which involve inner knowledge and relationship, both often highly prized in indigenous and other cultures, are largely ignored. This article maintains that, in future, learning institutions will need to move beyond a monophonic ‘university’ approach to become a polyphonic ‘multiversity’, that is a multi voice process endorsing multiple (and sometimes conflicting) ways of knowing.  

In the garden of our life many things may grow

There’s a time for cutting down, there’s a time to sow Seasons passing, the wind will change, clouds will cover the sun

Build a shelter from the storm, one that surely will come  

(chorus)

We must nurture, we must labor

For our future we must cater

If this garden lays forgotten

            Left to wither, there the beauty will die  [1]  

Poetry opens our unconscious to our futures yet to be born as well as creating a framework in which ‘the’ future is placed in the personal discourse that values our inner knowledge or ‘gnosis', instead of the usual expert discourse that uniquely values external ‘facts and figures’.  Today with renewed interest in indigenous knowledge or wisdom systems coupled with increasing evidence of environmental crises challenges to the dominant way of knowing are gathering momentum. This article does not decry these ostensibly ‘rational’ systems however it does argue that they alone are radically inadequate for the task at hand.  Future Universities must develop an epistemology to embrace these challenges. 

Ways of Thinking for Our Futures  

The new epistemology has got to be predicated upon a change of heart,

Upon a complete turning around....a new kind of language would be appropriate....a language more akin to poetry, or even to music, which would depict an experience directly, conveying, somehow its qualitative character  (Laing) [2]   

·         The Equivalence of Math and Myth

In considering the content of what is to be learned, this article posits that we need to give equal legitimacy to the mythic/symbolic as well as the rational ways of knowing.  One of the ways the symbolic can be expressed is through myths and stories.  Indeed story telling can be seen as a method of inquiry [3] .  Further such inquiry can thereby be related to theory building.  There is a dialectical equivalence of myth and theory. General theory is ascribed to the left-brain function, and is structural, literal and involved with explanation, while mythology and story-telling ascribed to the right-brain function, is involved with patterns, symbology and expression.  In this way theory and myth may be seen to be dialectically related.  For instance the paradigms that underlie theories are dialectically counterpoised with the archetypes that underlie mythology. While theory calls for comprehension, stories awaken apprehension. 

Regardless however of which path the learner follows, the goal is to embrace the differences between understanding and meaning by acknowledging their dialectical equivalence.  Such differences must not merely be tolerated, but rather seen as a fund of necessary polarities eg. perception and apperception, between which our creativity can swing, spark and generate union through this dialectic.  Such a ‘union’ however remains fragmentary, partial, provisional and needs to be struggled for.  It is not a given and never the basis of sameness. For example, the famous formula E=MC²  may be seen as dialectically equivalent with respect to the codification of knowledge to the Aboriginal Rainbow Serpent dreamtime myth of Cape York in Northern Australia. A revolutionary, and highly controversial, perspective no doubt. 

·         Multiple Ways of Knowing

Having established the importance of the theory/myth link with the relationship between information and imagination we can now look to developing actual descriptors of the ways of knowing implied on these two polarities. Today we tend to use information to feed the emptiness created by the absence of our imagination. The information myth is that we need information to improve our lives: 

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information  (Elliott)[4]  

By examining the diverse ways that individuals teach and learn we can approach a cognitive model that identifies five types of knowledge.  Wildman and Inayatullah [5] . The first three are standard anchoring in Aristotelian epistemics (ways of knowing):

•          The itch to do (techne):  the practical knowledge we use to do things           - practical knowledge or skills for doing.

•          The itch to know (scientia):  the propositions that we use to explain my world - propositional or scientific knowledge, knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

•          The itch to be (praxis):  the way we are as we live our lives through these changing times - experiential knowledge, knowledge for being.  To transform social conditions.

•          The itch to see (gnosis):  the ability to understand symbolically with our hearts         and our heads ie. insight-metaphoric knowledge - knowledge for seeing or intuiting ie. to think with one’s heart and feel with one’s head.

•          The itch to relate (relatio):  the way we learn to relate, communicate           with through belonging, through love.  It is the reason for engaging dialectic conversation, to find ways to relate authentically to others in the diversity of the worlds in which they exist. 

Intriguingly monophonic universities operationalise the first three (people knowing and doing things) and effectively ignore the last two (knowing yourself and knowing through relating).  The last two when added to the first three, in my opinion, make polyphonic multiversities inevitable.  The first three are especially dear to 'malestream' academics beliefs.  Maybe even the patriarchal influence through the knowledge system is so strong that we fail to realise how much this ‘meme’ of tacit knowledge has become uniquely attached to things ie. externalities and how little credibility we as scholars and academics attach to knowing for inner knowing (gnosis) and knowing others (relatio).

In many respects the first three are exoteric ie. dealing with external facts, figures and practice knowledges and the latter two are esoteric ie. dealing with inner and belonging knowledges.  Certainly in indigenous knowledge systems the latter two as myth and genealogies are crucial.  

·         The Big ‘T’ Truth V’s Floating Orbs of Meaning

As argued above scientia  can be seen as a search for big ‘T’ truth, absolute certitude and ‘the same’ universal knowledge through universal doubt/scepticism.  Here Truth becomes an assemblage of factual units of knowledge.  In this sense by rendering the unknown, and the future is unknown, universally replicable the scientia  approach brings or domesticates a portion of the future.  This domestication may be seen as times arrow moving towards the bullseye of absolute ‘T’ truth.  Such movement occurs in an historical context and aims at reducing the world and ‘the other’ to ‘the same’ since it is knowable.  Such a process of reduction places knowledge thus generated in pre-existing categories or ‘professionalised’ disciplines.  

Yet all the evidence today points to ‘net’ or ‘relatio’ knowledge ie. knowledge being generated between the disciplines.  The World Wide Web with its ‘hotlinks’ is an excellent example of this.  Clearly WWW has enormous implications for Future Uni. as it is a virtual 'relatio' host ie. it is NOT bricks and mortar and as a platform it exists independently of its constituent institutions and their academic boards, physical buildings etc.  Here meaning is less facts and figures locked within their respective discipline boxes and more nodes in networks of realtime web interactions.  Consequently meaning is not objective, universal and fixed rather it is intrajective, provisional and partial.  It moves in accordance with the nature of the contributions — more like ‘floating orbs of meaning’ and less like 'nuts and bolts of the universal machine'. 

In today’s world of environmental crisis, computers, internet and genetic engineering our futures have become so opaque.  What if they are now indeterminable and chaotic, and so different in a quantum sense that they are no longer comprehensible in terms of scientia extensions of the past smaller ‘t’ truths? 

In such an age of radical uncertainty and change even disjuncture, future knowledge needs to be seen more as provisional future-to-present relationship than as an historical arrow of present-to-future.  It needs to be seen as clusters of links, nodes or relationships rather than as something ‘factual’ of and in itself.  Consequently knowledge relates from the unknown and thereby redefines present established knowledge and in turn its associated disciplines.  For instance, in Australia, the Competency Based Training agenda seeks to reduce knowledge to units of skilled behaviour or techniques whereas the relatio approach maintains that knowledge is clusters of relationships which are constantly changing and that there is no one self-referential ‘best practice’ or ‘right fact’ or ‘skilled behaviour’. 

This suggests that to be relevant learning processes need to be in relationship from (not only to) our futures ie. learning today has to be shaped by our futures tomorrow.  Yet learning in the West is almost exclusively historically determined by ‘times arrow’ discipline focused and practically completely futures ‘relatio’ ignorant. 

Seven Key Emerging Issues For Future Universities

These are key issues that are influencing the course of development of the Polyphonic Multiversity over the next 30 years. 

·         The Emergent Knowledge Economy

The emergent education pedagogy maintains that once learners have acquired a foundational knowledge architecture, learning is most valued when it is just in time, rather than just in case.  The new information technologies, with their capacity to support simulations, action learning and discovery based problem solving, enable learning to be more highly customised to the individual learner, and to support greater degrees of contextualisation than that which characterised traditional lecture/classroom based learning. 

In the knowledge economy, where data and information are the raw material, value-adding will require higher order thinking skills, not only to convert information to knowledge, with all its inherent problems of bounded systems in particular disciplines or institutional frameworks.  It will also require capabilities that enable the conversion of 'fact and figures' knowledge into 'symbolical' knowledge of:

. Insight (patterns of interconnected meaning),

. Foresight (emergent patterns shaping the future) and, ultimately,

.  Hindsight (seeing patterns in the past that can point to our future possibilities)

. Wisdom (holistic awareness, built on the above three, linked to appropriate action).  Thus future competitive advantage may well flow from a capacity to increase our ability to embrace the development of learning from data and information to knowledge, insight and wisdom ie. from facts and figure to imagination. 

·         Globalisation

The globalisation of the economy and the convergence of technologies has placed a premium on learning and knowledge management as the major basis of competitive advantage, whether this be at the level of the individual, the organisation or the nation.  Newly industrialising nations such as Malaysia and China are investing heavily in education, albeit of the facts and figures type, to match the skills advantage which has traditionally been enjoyed by the OECD nations.  

Firms are investing in management consultants to help them become learning organisations, while individuals are investing in lifelong learning to keep abreast of new developments in knowledge and technology in their professional fields, or to re-skill to take advantage of new opportunities and avoid technological redundancy in the marketplace.  

So the globalisation imperative to take account of local potentialities and needs as well.  This suggests a concept like ‘glocal’ ie simultaneously locally relevant and building from the local to the global while recognising global emerging issues and experiences elsewhere. 

·         Community Capability

The multiveristy is ideally suited to contribute to, and learn from, community efforts towards sustainable development.  In this sense PolyVersites can become praxis centres for facilitating innovation on the ground in Community Economic Development and Futures Planning.  Presently UniVersities are repositories of ‘thinking’ rather than ‘doing’ in the classic dichotomy.  Doing is seen as ‘vocational’ and thinking as ‘real’ so praxis tends to get left behind and no where more so than in relationships between a UniVersity and its community.  These relationships tend to be one way of students to uni rather than a two way capability  building process. 

·         Pedagogy and Technology

In all this the University system seems to be lagging far behind not only in the information technology stakes but critically in the pedagogy stakes ie. chalk and talk dies hard.  Intriguingly much the same has happened in the health arena with millions of dollars per year being spent on alternative health practitioner [6] .  That is in the Byron Bay coastal resort area of Australia at any weekend there are upwards of 200 workshops and alternative learning experiences underway all outside the conventional University/Government system. So at the end of the day it seems that the business sector in conjunction with say an ethical/spiritual organisation will seem to carry the day rather than Government or Universities. 

Existing political and bureaucratic systems and institutions in many ways may be considered irrelevant to retrieval.  Initiatives such as ‘Subversity’ are offering a positive attractor to today’s and futures generations. 

·         The Post-Market Economy - an Emerging North/South Divide

The wholesale substitution of machines for workers is going to compel nations to rethink the role of human beings in social and learning processes. Redefining learning opportunities and responsibilities for millions of people in a ‘post-job’ society largely absent of mass formal employment is likely to be the single most pressing social issue of the coming century. For the whole of the modern era, people’s worth has been measured by the market value of their labour. Now that the commodity value of human labour is becoming increasingly tangential and irrelevant in an ever more automated world, new ways of defining human worth and social relationships will need to be explored. 

Referring to this process as the third industrial revolution, Rifkin suggests that without this redefinition, the net effect of the information and communications technologies and global market forces will be the polarisation of the world’s population into two irreconcilable and potentially warring forces [7] .  On one hand the new cosmopolitan elite of ‘symbolic analysts’ who control the technologies and the forces of production, and on the other the growing numbers of permanently displaced workers who have little hope and even fewer prospects for meaningful employment in the new high-tech global economy. 

This process can in part trigger the rising levels of crime, violence and imprisonment for instance in the United States. While displaced poor whites have retreated to armed vigilantism, combined with a growing hostility to their government, poor blacks find themselves trapped in inner city ghettos and criminal subcultures. The third world is no longer over ‘there’. For instance in Washington, the capital city of the richest and most technologically powerful nation on Earth, 40 per cent of black men are either in prison, in court or on the run [6] . 

·        Futures Shards

What has become frightening in my futures research is the broken-openness, fragmented nature of the world today, especially for our youth, as many of yesterdays ‘certainties’ are now ‘shards’. Today the world is more like a holographic reproduction of a broken vase than the original.  When working in this environment one never really knows when one working with a holographic piece of the whole that will 'fall/holo off' in your hand.  Indeed much media representation is via. the ubiquitous broken-off 30 sec sensational 'video bite' with any serious ongoing review of the issues glossed over. 

Field research into futures perceptions of street kids has supported this sense of gut wrenching angst and meaninglessness [8] .   The future is seen as alien, unknowable and unknown. In a horrifying sense educational systems seem unable even to recognise this issue. All predicate and legitimate their pedagogy on an ‘empirical epistem’ ie. scientia. Such a view generates tacit way of knowing that seems to betray all ‘within system’ attempts to find alternative education and learning systems.  

So many of us find ourselves inhabiting interstice futurescapes as intersections of multiple, contradictory, overlapping futures not reducible to 'one' particular paradigm.  Perhaps it is these shards that lead to the 'cracks' in the world that Leonard Cohen sees as a necessity for the paradigm to shift.  The following music extract relates to paradigm shifts as cracks in the worlds 

(chorus)

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack...a crack in everything

         That’s how the light gets in......[9]  

·         New Renaissance

Universities have, in my opinion, become part of the ‘new barbarism’ of narrowing of rational inquiry to evidential empirical ways of knowing.  Clearly we see the results in the world around us today from social to environmental system warping.  Wilber clearly establishes that intuition, theatre, dreams, introspection, imagination (symbolic logic) even passion  were all part of broader rationality that existed at the beginning of the enlightenment ie early 1700’s.  Little of this grand panorama now exists just detritus. [15]  The Western world needs a New Renaissance to cycle back to the original understanding of ‘rationality’ and then cycle forward to our children’s learning and education - our future generations. 

Creactive Futures Thinking — Valuing Diversity  

What kind of educational system could include a way of critical and creative thinking that could redefine ‘knowing’ so that it would describe as ‘possible', futures that were other than the official one [10] ?  Somehow Universities need to’ harmonise diversity rather than centralise conformity’. Difference must not merely be tolerated, but seen as a fount of necessary polarities eg. information and imagination, perception and apperception.  These polarities can help our creativity spark and generate new meanings through the operations of this dialectic equivalence. 

·         Indigenous futures

The challenge for those of us interested in indigenous futures is first to deconstruct the language, metaphors and methods of the world’s dominant civilisation, as suggested by Inayatullah in his work on civilisational futures[11].  He argues that among the contributions of postmodernity has been the de-universalisation of language, of the movement of reality as fixed to reality as porous, negotiable and interpretive even hermeneutical.  This has been particularly so for the ‘future’.  

While we often use terms like 21st century or BC in taken for granted ways,   in fact they are highly particular signatures.  How do indigenous cultures imagine their future(s)? How do they time it? What are their visions of society and self? Imagination, information, time and vision are seen as culturally specific even gender specific [11] .  

Once deconstructed, the task is to ask if there are any universals in the sea of differences?  Must the ‘other’ always be distant or can we create an ethics of intimacy? Can we participate in visioning and creating a global ethics or are we now bound to eternal postmodern relativism?  Inayatullah argues that for those outside conventional knowledge, these are not academic issues rather issues of life and death, of self-worth and identity.  He continues that most of our pedagogy makes 80% of the world feel worthless since their histories, metaphors, prophets and ideals are silent, more so their future [11] .  

·         World Brainer - HG Wells on Future Uni.

The prophetic views of HG Wells’ which called in the 1930s for a world brain today seem answered in part by the rapidly growing infrastructure of the World Wide Web.  Yet, will this latest techno-fix  restore our lost wisdom or provide meaning for our youth who seem to have lost their way?  This article argues that we need to move towards a ‘World Brain’ and then beyond to ‘World Mind’ and even further out to ‘World Soul’.  This will mean going beyond current educational paradigms towards a holistic learning one where learning will occur through relationship.  

HG Wells had the view that the apparatus of modern intellectual ability is not being put to good use.  For him, collective views on how we should proceed are sadly lacking in modern humanity, even more so as time passes.  He asks poignantly.  Why are our 'universities floating above the general disorder of mankind like a beautiful sunset over a battlefield' - he asks [12] ?  Indeed, in my opinion since the Second World War our education systems in general and Universities in particular, have done little more than credential the status quo by being little more than knowledge control vehicles for the dominant orthodoxy as it marches into the eco-battle fields of tomorrow.  Even worse, the world seems ever more chaotic and less and less organised.  In this sense the idea of polyphonic multiversities seems ideally well suited.

Towards a Futures Active Learning Systems (FALS)  

In this section we try to get a picture of what a FALS may look like.  The emergence of such systems is in many ways blocked by present academic debris and hubris.  Clearly if Future University is to reach beyond these reactionary inertia’s it will have actively contribute to ways society can envision itself 30-50 years out.  After Slaughter I call this role ‘Institutions of Foresight’, other roles include embracing other ways of making meaning ie learning, subversive or system challenge and action learning ie. seeing the lecture room of tomorrow as the workplace, residence.  

·         Future Universities’ as Institutions of Foresight

Critically today almost all of our energies are directed historically rather than seeking to proactively involve our forecestors in foresighting their and our futures.  Business, government, community and learning systems seem incapable of reaching beyond the present. Intriguingly some business and spiritual systems seem more able to do this than Universities. Slaughter calls for Institutions of Foresight (IOFs) to be formed to redress this lack of futures focus [13, 14] . He proposes IOFs for each of the above mentioned great institutions of Western ‘civilisation’.  

In the sense of the web learning for foresight will be come more a process of student exploration and the Universities’ role as one of brokering knowledge will emerge.  Brokering is used in a broad sense to include:

· Brokering courses from several sources and packaging them

for a specific students needs

· Co-developing student learning projects and contracts

· Helping students navigate their chosen learning path

· Act as critical/creactive friend and provide peer and net support

· Engage in co-generative learning and joint publishing

· Strategic alliances between learning institutions, industry and community organisations

· Pilot innovations such as sustainable communities, infomation networks, industry innovations etc. that action the creactive edge of the IOF

· Establish Future Watch, or watching briefs, systems of helping society keep track of emerging issues some 20; 30 and 50 years out.  [Strategic planning can take us out 10 years] 

In Australia the now moribund Commission for the Future could have provided this role. Presently there are essentially no such institutions and futures studies remains the province of the enthusiastic few. Such an IOF role seems crucial if this thing called University is to have any significant social change meaning in Australia post 2000. 

            ·         Subversity - an example of foresighting a 'futureversity'

A group in rural Australia, of which I am a member, is seeking to develop an ‘off-grid’ futureversity, realising that many people today see the ‘off-grid’ nature of much of our future.  We see our market as backpackers and youth growing up in and then moving away from alternative communities.  There are around 200 such intentional communities in the region (Northern New South Wales) with an estimated 20,000 people and 6,500 youth.  Today most youth leave the communities in their late teens, seeking an 'alternative to the alternative', yet often not being suited to 'fitting in to' mainstream society either. 

The concept being developed is called a ‘subversity’, recognising that most cutting edge research is now done outside universities which have tended to degenerate to ‘credentialling the status quo’.  Accreditation is deliberately not being sought and in addition, the concept will provide an alternative to ‘sage on stage’ lecturing on the one hand, and web based non personal ‘hyper learning’ on the other.  Learning processes will combine  workshops using theatre, and bush settings sprinkled with Socratic dialogue in an attempt to embrace the original Enlightenment vision of rationality.  Subversity will combine a living leaning experience with four key issues: activism to change the system, inner knowledge and cultural empowerment all bound together with a ‘Global Citizens Charter’ which in turn is embedded in ‘planetary consciousness’ even spirituality.    

·    Further Pointers to Future Meaning Making

A Futures sensitive learning system will also seek to:

- Be holistic in that it embraces math and myth, data and dreams, dissection and dance ie. a broader understanding of ‘rational’, including and beyond empiricism

- Is transdisciplinary and includes gnosis and relatio as well as the other ‘big three’ ways of knowing

- Develop ways of brokering learning ie. strategic alliances with Industry and other Unis., navigating the web, student oriented degree structures etc.

- Articulate to a post-job economy and a social system undergoing rapid change ie. shards

- Help Universities become action learning institutions themselves and to deal with the end of the metanarrative and increasing fragmentation

- Help learners learn the ability to think and act creatively ie‘creactively’ in ways that help generate their own futures narrative and reduce feelings of meaninglessness

- Move Universities towards becoming Institutions of Foresight (IOF) that undertake actions to demonstrate this commitment and in particular relate this to their local communities

- Incorporate indigenous and multi-civilisational perspectives

- Give voice to futures generations

In all these imply the Monophonic University becoming a Polyphonic Multiversity. 

In original work I did in this area the following point was included:

- Incorporate an esoteric and exoteric components in learning.

Although vital, nowadays I exclude this topic, not for its inappropriateness within a traditional University context rather for the need for this link to be established in ‘wisdom networks’ outside/beyond Universities.  Universities have in my opinion become part of the ‘new barbarism’ of narrowing of rational inquiry to evidential empirical ways of knowing. 

Conclusion  

In many ways this article has argued that the current University system is not able to cope with the changes even now upon it.  So much of its energy is absorbed within its bureaucracy and bricks and mortar.  Consequently the transition to polyphonic multiversities must not be seen as an inevitable, or final, step.  The argument was advanced that we need to look beyond the status quo to the periphery, for innovative and effective ways of knowing that can work towards resolving these dilemmas.  This will mean reconstructing truth and its constituent facts and figures towards seeing  ‘math/myth’ balance as crucial to making meaning.  Perhaps it is such an approach to knowledge that can help us embrace the idea of polyphonic multiversities. 

Acknowledgments

Critique and encouragement from Sohail Inayatullah, Jenny Gidley, Rick Slaughter are gratefully acknowledged. 

Notes

1.       Mouthmusic, Shorelife, . 1994, Dolphin Music Group: London.

2.       Capra, F., Uncommon Wisdom: Conversations with Remarkable People. 1988, London: Flamingo. 352.

3.       Reason, P. and P. Hawkins, Story-telling as inquiry, in Human Inquiry  in Action:  Developments in new Paradigm Research, P. Reason, Editor. 1988, Sage: London. p. 79-101.

4.       Wildman, P., “A Note on Mythopoetic Futuring and Strategic Planning”. Futures Bulletin, 1995. December, 14-15.

5.       Wildman, P. and S. Inayatullah, “Ways of Knowing, Culture, Communication and the Pedagogies of the Future”. Futures, 1996. 28(8), 723-740.

6.       Lepani, B. Designing Education and City Futures for the 21st Century. in LETA Conference, 29th September -4th October. 1996. Adelaide.

7.       Rifkin, J., The End of Work:  The Decline of the Global Labour Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. 1995: Tarcher/Putnam.

8.       Gidley, J. and P. Wildman, “What are we missing? - A review of the educational and vocational interests of marginalised rural youth”. Education in Rural Australia Journal, 1996. 6(2), 9-19.

9.       Cohen, L., The Future, . 1992, Colombia.

10.     Ellsworth, E.,” Why doesn't this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy”. Harvard Educational Review, 1989. 59(3), 297-324.

11.     Inayatullah, S., “Futures Visions for South-east Asia: some early warning signals”. Futures, 1995. 27(6), 681-688.

12.     Wells, H., World Brain:  HG Wells on the Future of World Education (first published in 1938). 1994, London: Adamantine Press.

13.     Slaughter, R., “The Foresight Principle”. Futures, 1990(October), 801-819.

14.     Slaughter, R., “Towards and Agenda for Institutions of Foresight”. Futures, 1995. 27(1), 91-95.

15.    Wilber, K. (1995). Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Boston:

          Shambhala.