Category: Leadership Blog

It has become quite cliché for UWC graduates to talk about how their two years as a student were the most formative in their lives. And yet, I also want to make this claim. I went to UWC Mahindra in India from 1998 to 2000.

While I don’t want to encourage rule-breaking among current students necessarily, these adventures were an important part of my Mahindra experience. The chance to get a close-up glimpse of life—both human and otherwise—in rural India was a great opportunity for me. Nature had always played a very important role in my life. I had spent much of my childhood just walking through the woods of my native Bavaria in Germany. By placing me in rural India, in a place with fabulous biodiversity, stark inequality but also dramatic economic growth, UWC prompted me to think more globally about the challenges we face as a species on a finite planet.

After working at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales as a lecturer and consultant on renewable energy, I have returned to the UWC fold as sustainability coordinator at UWC Robert Bosch College in Freiburg, Germany. On paper, the role of sustainability in UWC has changed massively since my student days—after all, “a sustainable future” is now on a level with “peace” in our mission statement. In reality, education for peace and international understanding is built right into the very fabric and structures of UWC in ways that environmental sustainability is not (yet). Simply by bringing together young people from all around the world, we cannot fail to foster international understanding. Yet the very same act—thousands of young people flying thousands of miles— already pushes the carbon footprint of our students well beyond what is allowed per person to avoid the worst of climate change.

UWC was a great solution to the challenges of the 20th century, but it is struggling to claim relevance, let alone leadership, on the emerging sustainability challenges of today. Moving away from a “diversity of passports” to an understanding of diversity that can be achieved with fewer air miles, planting whole forests to offset our emissions, and doing everything to make our campuses more sustainable are all necessary steps to reduce UWC’s gaping credibility gap on sustainability.

But if we want UWC to be as relevant to the great environmental challenges of today as it was to the political challenges of its time when it started half a century ago, then we will have to think more fundamentally about what making education a force for building a sustainable future should look like.

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UWC-USA invites members of the wider UWC community to share their thoughts on topics relevant to the UWC movement.

 

 

 

In the wake of the 2016 election, I traveled the country and met with a diversity of people to document the hate they experienced during the campaign and under the Trump administration.

Vicious intimidation and cybertrolling, vandalism and arson of houses of worship, and assault or even murder on their own doorstep, people are targeted across this country because of who they are and what they believe.

Communities also experience hate through cruel and discriminatory policies: banishing immigrants and separating them from their families because they do not have papers; depriving the elderly, poor, communities of color, and people with disabilities of health care; and threatening to send refugees home where they would face an uncertain future.

As I traveled the country and met with survivors in their homes, houses of worship, and community centers, I saw an extraordinary amount of pain, hurt, and suffering. But I also saw plenty of resilience, too.

Survivors are not recoiling or abandoning hope. They are coming together, rebuilding their lives, and advocating for a better future for us all. Their communities are following their example by reaching across divides, building stronger coalitions, and centering young people and women of color in the fight against hate and state violence.

Just weeks into my journey, I quickly learned that there is a spirit of love and joy in these communities that hate cannot destroy—a spirit that originates and endures because of the power of community.

This same community exists at the United World College in New Mexico. That’s why I accepted a fellowship in residence at the school just weeks before my book manuscript was due. I knew that the community, and the love and care they have for one another, would motivate me to complete my book American Hate: Survivors Speak Out.

And that’s precisely what happened. When I taught class, the students would ask about hate violence and how they could help curb it. When I met with the school Amnesty International chapter, the students began planning a program on campus where their peers affected by the travel ban could share their stories. When I spoke at the school assembly about civil rights abuses, the students described their volunteer work in local detention centers.

Other times, it was more subtle. I can’t remember the number of times I saw students check in on folks who were sitting alone during a meal or otherwise by themselves. Everyone felt included. Everyone belonged.

There’s an extraordinary spirit of community in the foothills of Montezuma, New Mexico, and the rest of the country would be wise to follow their example.

Arjun Singh Sethi is an activist, lawyer, professor, and friend of UWC-USA.