Universities assume they will be around forever, in fact, they savor the thought. As sons and daughters of Dartmouth, most of us can’t help but feel a tinge of pride to think that our school is older than the United States of America. Yet, during most of Dartmouth’s history, change in society unfolded relatively slowly. Times are different now; global change has been stomping on the accelerator pedal, and the past no longer serves to predict the future. Ray Kurzweil, one of the nation’s foremost futurists, runs a company that tracks indicators of technological advance. He describes change this way:

…the twentieth century was like twenty years of change at today’s rate of change; in the next twenty years we’re going to make five times the progress you saw in the twentieth century; and we’ll make twenty thousand years of progress in the twenty-first century, which is almost a thousand times more technical change than we saw in the twentieth century. Exponential change is quite explosive.

This explosion doesn’t just characterize technology, but also population growth. Two hundred years ago we were 1.5 billion people in the world and it took us a few million years of heated effort to get to that point. Today we are 6.4 billion people and growing. The same growth drives our economy, consumption of resources, and carbon build-up in the atmosphere. But it does not describe our cultural evolution of social institutions, such as universities, usually far outpaced by technological and economic expansion.

Now we return to Dartmouth. In 1992 I wrote an article in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine that discussed the many outstanding environmental activities at the school, yet the College itself boasted no institutional position or leadership for the theme. I recommended establishing a dean of the environment and an environmental principle as other universities had done. While these efforts seemed sufficient back then, they don’t anymore. Population has shot up, per capita global food production has been declining, energy insecurity has been growing, rate of species loss is increasing, and the effects of climate change are every day popping up all around the world.

Are Dartmouth’s food services ready for rapidly increasing food prices? Is the campus ready for different kinds of trees in Upper Valley forests? Is the Dartmouth ski team ready for reduced snowfall? Are the heating plant, vehicle fleet, and utilities ready for the transition to a non-petroleum economy? Is Dartmouth’s commitment to need-blind admissions ready for an increasing income-opportunity gap among its target audiences? Is the administration ready for increased economic and political chaos in the world? Of course not — it takes years of planning to devise responses to these trends. But Dartmouth, like many other universities, projects the past into the future, assuming it can continue on with small changes in navigation forever, or at the least, far into the future. I offer several recommendations to President Wright to undertake with the assumption that global change is accelerating, rather than strolling forward as it has done for most of its history.

Most of the time, we are not accustomed to thinking long-term. We watch the daily stock values but don’t max out our IRA contributions. We hesitate on fixing Social Security today though we know it will collapse in 40 years if we don’t. We know that global oil production will peak in the next 20–30 years (it already peaked in the US in 1970), yet we invest little in alternative energies or reducing demand. Global climate change also requires thinking in advance. On 24 January a report issued by the Institute for Public Policy Research in Britain, the Center for American Progress in the United States, and The Australia Institute warned that global warming is approaching the tipping point of no return in as little as 10 years, after which widespread drought, crop failure, and rising sea-levels would be irreversible. Just remember that the global community began combating ozone depletion in the mid-1980s and the hole won’t stop growing for another 50 years and that is with foresighted international treaties!

The number of global problems increases every year from the obvious (climate change) to the less obvious (increased resistance of bacteria to major antibiotics). One thing that systems theory teaches us is that delays make systems behave in strange ways. If we wait too long, the remedy won’t take effect until long after the damage has been done. Universities, like Dartmouth, are accustomed to moving slowly and cautiously because they have all the time in the world. Or so they think.