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1 Introduction
To teach our future leaders sustainable development (SD) is the key issue for our planet to survive: the challenge is so enormous that we need to mobilize all the brainpower that we can get. Education is of key importance: by many years of research an academic might develop a 1 percent more efficient technology. Compare that result to motivating ten students a year to develop and apply technologies that are 1 percent more efficient for the rest of their lives [...] [1] .
SD is a normative concept: the responsibility for future generations and for the poor and underprivileged of this world is a normative choice. However, it is a choice that is as such almost universally accepted: I personally never met anybody that seriously argued to give up this planet, and just let various sustainability catastrophes happen. The two main elements of SD, responsibility to the poor and to future generations, are present in all major cultures of the world:
Responsibility towards future generations is reflected in the virtually universal rule that children should be protected and taken care of.
Responsibility towards underprivileged is reflected in many rules in all major religions of the world as well as in humanism and socialism. Market liberalism, with its emphasis on individual reward for individual achievement, claims that this is even most favorable for the underprivileged. Moreover, it is in practice often combined with a religious or a humanistic worldviews that prescribes individuals to help the underprivileged.
On the basic issue that survival of mankind and human civilization is important, we all agree. However, if it comes to real action to become even a little more sustainable, the consequences might hurt group interest and values, and lead to normative conflict. How to deal with this conflict in higher education?
2 Values, science, and the academy
Universities have an ambivalent position towards ideologies: mediaeval universities were founded as communities of learning. However, academic learning (as distinct from learning for crafts) was not legitimized by its inherent value: the work of scholars was aimed at strengthening the glory of God by studying his natural and social laws ([17] van den Daele, 1978). We all know about the conflict that broke out between Galilee Galileo and the church....