At one point in this month’s Council Pulse, Patricija Zizyte of oikos International described the periodic question that catches up with many people working on systemic change: what am I actually doing?
Almost immediately someone responded in the chat:
“I wake up every day asking myself ‘what the heck am I doing’… so you are definitely not alone!”
It was a small exchange, but it captured something of the room.
Across Australia, Denmark, Portugal, Serbia, Scotland, South Africa and the international student network, people were describing institutions under financial pressure, rapidly changing expectations of education, artificial intelligence unsettling familiar practices, and a sustainability vocabulary that sometimes seems simultaneously everywhere and insufficient.
And yet this was not a conversation characterised by resignation. Again and again, the question became: what might we see differently if we place these signals next to one another, and where might relatively small acts of collaboration create leverage?
Council Pulse is a monthly working conversation among GRLI Partners, Associates and collaborators. It is intended less as a reporting meeting than as a place to bring unfinished observations, tensions, questions, practices, asks and offers. What follows is therefore a selective reflection rather than a transcript. Some candid institutional material has been generalised or omitted to preserve the trust of the room.
What does pressure reveal about what we value?
Fara Azmat joined from Deakin Business School in Melbourne at the end of a long day of meetings. Her opening signal was financial: Australian universities are confronting shrinking enrolments, regulatory pressures and constrained resources. Her concern was not simply the size of the budgets. It was what happens next. When sustainability remains an additional initiative rather than something embedded in institutional strategy and purpose, she suggested, it can become one of the first things sacrificed when resources tighten.
Others recognised the pattern. From Portugal, Patrícia Duarte described the pressure not only on universities but on students themselves. Housing in Lisbon has become prohibitively expensive for many families. Later in the chat she added another dimension: energy poverty, as homes poorly equipped for either cold or increasingly severe heat become part of the lived reality of climate change.
Another participant described a university environment in which financial crisis has produced a strong instinct towards cutting rather than imagining alternative routes to renewal. The institutional specifics are less important here than the question this placed into the room:
“How financially literate are the people making consequential decisions about the future shape of universities?”
The question arose whether we (at GRLI) could and should create a space in which academics, deans, senior university leaders and others examine how the economics of universities actually work, including assumptions about the relative costs and contributions of different disciplines?
Lavinia saw potential interest at Copenhagen Business School. Patrícia offered to test the idea with colleagues at Iscte. By the end of the conversation, what began as frustration was becoming the outline of a possible GRLI Crucial Conversation: not a workshop arriving with an answer, but perhaps three anchoring perspectives followed by inquiry into financial literacy, transparency and the ethics of institutional decision-making.
AI is disrupting assessment — but perhaps not only in the way we think
Artificial intelligence surfaced almost immediately as another pressure changing what universities do.
Patrícia described discussions at Iscte about reducing reliance on conventional written assignments because generative AI can now produce so much of what those assignments historically asked students to demonstrate. Oral assessment is one possible response, but administering it across thousands of students creates an obvious scaling problem.
Fara noted that Deakin is also increasing oral assessment. Lavinia described similar experiments at CBS, including renewed interest in handwritten work, while also pointing to a second question: how should faculty themselves be learning to work with AI?
Morris suggested that AI should not be understood only as a threat. Like calculators and personal computers before it, it may become an important learning tool. He also raised the possibility that AI could act as an equaliser, giving students with fewer financial and educational advantages access to forms of support previously available mainly to the better resourced.
The resulting inquiry is therefore larger than “How do we stop students using AI for assignments?” Instead, what forms of learning do we genuinely value? What evidence tells us that learning has occurred? Where can AI extend access and capability? And which responsibilities for judgement, integrity and relationship remain ours even as more capabilities can be delegated?
Has “sustainability” become too easy a word?
Perhaps the most provocative thread concerned the language around sustainability itself.
Patricija, speaking from the perspective of oikos International and its student community, described asking students why they become involved. Again and again the response is some version of: because I care about sustainability. Her frustration is that “sustainability” can become an undefined cloud. If we cannot articulate what specifically we care about, it becomes harder to understand the system we are trying to change or the action we are prepared to take.
Morris noted experiences of students showing little appetite for generic sustainability courses, particularly when these were narrowly associated with net zero. Lavinia responded that CBS sees a more differentiated picture: some student groups want substantially more sustainability in their education, while others are resistant to the language altogether. Their programme choices may themselves provide clues about where different forms of sustainability literacy are most needed.
Fara then placed a larger horizon over the discussion:
What comes after 2030?
The Sustainable Development Goals have provided a common frame, but the final years of the 2030 Agenda are approaching amid intensifying climate, social and technological pressures. Whatever succeeds them is still uncertain. What, then, should business schools be embedding now so that purpose, responsibility and long-term thinking do not depend upon the continued currency of one framework?
Patricija added perhaps the most vivid image of the session. Recalling a panel on the post-2030 agenda at a sustainability congress, she described leaving the conference venue near the waterfront and seeing local children swimming in polluted water, physically pushing plastic aside to get through.
For her, the underlying issue was disconnection: from ourselves, from one another and from the environments of which we are part. Perhaps the challenge is therefore not to find a better definition of sustainability. It may be to recover the connections obscured when we separate climate from housing, biodiversity from poverty, technology from ethics, or one SDG from the system around it.
Connecting work that is already happening
The final part of Pulse deliberately shifts from diagnosis towards asks and offers. Two concrete connections emerged.
Lavinia invited the wider community into the Biodiversity and Business conversations being convened through Copenhagen Business School: informal online coffee sessions where academics and practitioners share research, teaching cases, projects and emerging practice around biodiversity literacy in business education.
The conversation immediately found an echo in Australia. Fara described Deakin’s own Sustainability Collective, another recurring space where people share research, teaching and practitioner perspectives. The two agreed to explore exchanging speakers and connecting the communities.
The chat took this a step further. Lavinia is also developing a Biodiversity Literacy for Business Students workshop and invited Patricija to explore whether the student perspective from oikos could connect with it. These may sound like modest connections. That is precisely the point.
We repeatedly encounter good work already happening in different parts of the system without those efforts necessarily being able to see one another. GRLI’s role need not be to create another central programme. Sometimes it is simply to help existing work travel: Copenhagen to Melbourne, student networks into faculty experiments, one institution’s question into a Crucial Conversation involving several others.
Or, as Fara put it in the checkout:
“Collaboration for change and collective impact.”
And the inquiry Patricija brought us back to was purpose itself: how do we continue walking into uncertainty without pretending that we already know the answers?
There is no shortage of activity across responsible management education. The harder task may be strengthening the connections between those efforts while being willing, occasionally, to change the projection through which we view the landscape.
Carrying the conversation forward
Three threads are already available to pick up:
- University financial literacy and ethical decision-making: we will explore whether this can become a future GRLI Crucial Conversation, with several participants helping shape the inquiry.
- Biodiversity and Business: CBS will share forthcoming dates for its informal online coffee sessions; GRLI can help the invitation travel more widely.
- Cross-institution learning: CBS and Deakin will explore exchange between their biodiversity/sustainability communities, while oikos and CBS have opened a conversation around student participation in biodiversity literacy work.
- The next round of the partner-driven GRL4ST collaborative course also begins towards the end of September, another place where learning can move between institutions rather than remaining confined within them.
Council Pulse meets again as part of this continuing working rhythm. Bring a signal. Bring something unfinished. Bring an ask or an offer. Above all, bring a question worth holding with others.
