Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

What higher education can bring to resilience: reports from Pace University's water resilience conference Michael H. Finewood 1 + Joseph A. Henderson 2 Published online: 6 July 2019 © AESS 2019 Abstract Resilience is commonly understood as a way to characterize the ability of a system to absorb shocks and maintain functions, as well as the capacity for renewal, reorganization, and development. Higher education is clearly at the center of these conversations, guiding training, theory, research, and practice. In this introduction to the special symposium on Pace University's water resilience conference, we consider the role of academia in bringing new knowledge to resilience discourses and the responsibility these institutions have in examining and critiquing the politics of resilience governance. Our goal for this introduction is to link manuscripts written by professors, researchers, and collaborators to the broader literature while making the argument that colleges and universities must not only contribute to resilience studies, but we must also help reimagine these ideas and the systems we deem to make more resilient. Keywords Resilience • Water • Higher education • Environmental education Resilience as academic agenda Emerging from systems research (Holling 1973), resil- ience is commonly understood as a way to characterize the ability of a system to absorb shocks and maintain functions, as well as the capacity for renewal, reorgani- zation, and development (Folke et al. 2005). As a con- ceptual project, resilience is clearly important. It has helped scientists and practitioners move past the idea that systems are balanced or static (thus leaving our interpretation of how they function to a very narrow snapshot) and that becoming more resilient means creating more reflexive and adaptive management approaches (Carpenter and Brock 2004). Resilience frameworks have been developed and implemented in a range of different contexts across the public and private sectors (Walker and Salt 2012), endeavoring to merge human and nonhuman systems into the more dynamic and holistic "social-ecological" whole (Adger 2000). A resilient system should be able to cope with complexity and near constant system changes while protecting the components people value (Meerow and Newell 2016). Higher education is clearly at the center of these conversations, guiding training, theory, research, and practice (Ardito 2018; Sriskandarajah et al. 2010). In this introduction, we consider the role of academia— colleges and universities—in bringing new knowledge to resilience discourses and the responsibility these in- stitutions have in examining and critiquing the politics of resilience governance. We suggest that resilience frameworks developed through and with academia help to create reactive strategies for coping with sys- tem shocks, but we question the capacity of colleges and universities to reimagine those systems in the first place. We feel this is a critical next step in resilience study and practice. In April 2017, Pace University's Dyson Col- lege (New York) held their third resilience conference with a focus on water. e conference highlighted the cooperation and conflict that must be acknowledged (Harris et al. 2017) to create and implement resilient water governance strategies (Baldwin et al. 2018; see also the papers included in this symposium). e con- ference was structured around global, national, and local scales of water resource governance, with an emphasis on both the idiosyncratic character of these different scales as well as the connections and similar- ities between them. e setting of a university within a global city was not arbitrary; it helped to highlight several critical questions: Are cities the centerpiece of resilience experimentation? Can resilience be imple- mented without becoming another buzzword? Can we 1 Pace University, 861 Bedford Road, Pleasantville, NY 10570, USA 2 Paul Smith's College, 7777 NY-30, Paul Smiths, NY 12970, USA 4

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