Over the next several weeks, ‘What is Sustainability’ posters will be appearing on campus featuring the insights of politicians, activists, writers and community leaders about how to develop ‘sustainability’ politics. At the same time, students will have an opportunity to respond with their own ideas by completing writing prompts distributed in classrooms, dining centers and libraries, as well as the writing center in Huntington Beard Crouse Hall. These words will also be placed upon posters and distributed across campus. All of this debate and dialogue will culminate with a daylong discussion on sustainability, the theme of SU Showcase 2010.

For today’s students, however, sustainability is more than a debate question or event theme. Unlike almost any other generation, today’s students will come of age in a time of the most significant economic downtown since the Great Depression, a period where their peers are fighting a global war on terror and at a moment when the country is engaged in an extended debate concerning whether every citizen deserves equal rights regardless of their sexuality. Resting beneath all these issues lie questions about global warming and climate change – primary questions about what type of planet debates about economics, war or equality will take place. In short, this generation is engaged in a sustained conversation concerning what will mark the fundamental values of the United States in the next century.

In such a serious time, SU Showcase has retooled itself to serve as a vehicle to support and extend such conversations. Through its SU Showcase Fellows program, we hope to attract students whose academic and civic work highlights not only the difficulties of ‘sustainability,’ but the scientific, communal and political solutions being developed. These current and future leaders, we hope, will spark a conversation with those in attendance not only about the role of a university in preparing students for the future, but the future work of this generation. We hope to have these voices joined by classrooms, student organizations and campus-based projects that also point toward where this generation of students hopes to lead the country.

In the early 1960s, C. Wright Mills wrote an essay announcing students as the new leaders of social and political progress. The history of that decade has been written and rewritten, but few accounts can discount the important role of students from across the political spectrum in sparking social change. At this moment and with this SU Showcase, we also hope to announce the historical importance of a generation, a generation that has offered more than has been publicly acknowledged, and that will take on more challenges, than has historically been the case.

I hope you will join the conversation beginning to take place on a ‘sustainable future,’ apply to be a SU Showcase Fellow and join with your peers on April 19 in beginning to chart a sustainable course for years to come.

Steve ParksDirector, SU ShowcaseAssociate professor of writing and rhetoric

sjparks@syr.edu

Published on March 8, 2010 at 12:00 pm