Complex Challenges Demand Interconnected Approaches

ACUI Talks: Anya Kamenetz

With a background that includes degrees from one of the top public high schools in the United States, followed by Yale University, and having a best-selling author as a father,  award-winning author and reporter Anya Kamenetz has offered readers a breadth of work ranging from childhood education, technology, and most recently higher education and the impacts of the pandemic.

Speaking to ACUI members during ACUI Talks, Kamenetz took her “passion for the complexities of how we learn, work, and live in a rapidly changing world,” to the topic of climate change and how a refocus to a single lens on the crisis can be used to put the issue into the context of a single, interconnected systemic risk. It is a risk, she said, that can only be addressed by “coping and thriving in the atmosphere as a team; coming together, expressing feelings, and then figuring out strategies.”

Described as a “polycrisis,” climate change is an interconnected risk that will require a multi-solution that includes resilient, layered, and flexible strategies that can achieve many things at once. “Look at something as simple as the walkable campus. It does several things at once: health benefits, it reduces carbon emissions, it increases social connectedness, and all in turn provide better learning experiences.”

“We all need to be looking for ways to be as agile and as resilient as possible,” she said, then paraphrased Ram Das: “I practice turning people into trees, which means appreciating them just the way they are.”