HOME

IF UNIVERSITIES ARE NOT ASKED TO TEACH PEACE; THEY DO NOT HAVE TO DISCUSS IT

Universities set agendas, and they follow them. If a subject is never placed on that agenda, it is never taught — not because it was rejected, but because it was never raised. That is the quiet mechanism I want to name directly: a university does not need to refuse to discuss a hard question. It only needs to never bring it up, and the avoidance takes care of itself, indefinitely, without anyone ever having to make an unpopular decision to keep it that way. There are a great many real, pressing questions about peace circulating through the world human society right now. In most cases, universities behave as though those questions do not exist. They carry no obligation to teach what was never acknowledged as a subject in the first place. The same question might be argued over by a preacher, debated in a focus group, or shouted about at a protest — but a university, left to its own institutional habits, tends not to engage with the harder version of these questions unless forced to, usually by exactly that kind of external pressure. Left alone, the default is apathy: don't ask, and you don't have to discuss it.

I have appointed myself to bring these questions to the universities directly, under the banner of Teach Peace, precisely because no one else is positioned to do it honestly. I do not expect government, religion, or corporations to run this discussion without their own interest quietly shaping the outcome — profit, doctrine, or power, in some combination, sits behind each of them. The university is the one institution built, in principle, for genuinely unbiased inquiry. I allege that universities are simply not using that position for the majority of the world's real, unresolved peace-related questions.

What this project has built is both the case and the method at once. The case: a great many real global and local problems are not being discussed anywhere with a genuine peace objective, and universities are the correct venue for that discussion.

The method: a working list of real questions, each one capable of being taken into a classroom and examined honestly, without a supplied verdict, in a way that would measurably increase the peace if it were actually taught. Having defined both the problem and the method to address it, I am stating plainly what follows: universities have an obligation to establish a department and a curriculum dedicated to teaching peace — not as an elective curiosity, but as a genuine fulfillment of the mandate they already claim to hold.

So I ask this directly, in my own voice, though I know I am not the only one who has ever wondered it: why is there no forward-looking, present-day Teach Peace curriculum in every university — not a history course studying wars and treaties after the fact, but a living discipline processing the peace-related conflicts of today, as they happen, the way every other real subject a university teaches is processed in the present tense?