Abstract
The recommendations of the UN and other international bodies on the need to transform university curricula to incorporate sustainability values, content and competencies have met with a warm reception from universities all over the world. However, the actual state of the integration of sustainability in higher education is, in general, somewhat more modest than one would expect. This article proposes a method of measuring the extent of sustainability-oriented curricular change in the Spanish University as a whole and applies it to the degrees in engineering and architecture. The method entails a documentary analysis of the teaching guides related to 1050 subjects. The results obtained do not invite optimism: curricular transformation is slow and insufficient and its results are still incomplete.
Highlights
The recommendations of the United Nations (UN) and other international bodies on the need to transform university curricula to incorporate sustainability values, content and competencies have met with a warm reception from universities all over the world
“sustainable development” occupy in the media, or on the speed with which the term has been incorporated into the language of politics, we would no doubt conclude that society is accepting the responsibility for its part in the process of accelerated destruction of the foundations of its own existence, and that it has shouldered the responsibility of implementing the profound transformation which, if it is delayed any longer, will force future generations to bear the punishment for the ignorance of the present
Half the subjects in the sample do not mention a single category related to sustainability in their teaching guides
Summary
The recommendations of the UN and other international bodies on the need to transform university curricula to incorporate sustainability values, content and competencies have met with a warm reception from universities all over the world. We would only point out that there is an excess of declarations about sustainable development at both the institutional and individual levels that contrasts with a stark deficit of specific actions. This imbalance can be verified in the more specific field of higher education. More and more higher education institutions (HEIs) have publicly declared their ineluctable commitment to sustainable development [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] but there is no evidence that they have been diligent in transforming their activities to contribute to sustainability. Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
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