Each afternoon this week Di and I invited a group of the new 1st Year students to our home for welcome drinks.  This was a thoroughly enjoyable time of meeting and mixing with some remarkable young men and women who have been specially selected to represent their country in the international setting of our United World College.  And it was easy to see why!  They were (and still are, of course) an extremely impressive group of articulate, idealistic, engaging, enquiring and diverse students.  I am really looking forward to the next two years of working with them.

During the drinks, I spoke to the students and posed three challenges for them to aim for during their coming two years at LPCUWC.  Each challenge related to an aspect of ‘sustainability’ - that increasingly over-used but nonetheless profoundly important word.

ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY - our staff have committed themselves to making environmental sustainability a focus area in the College for the coming year.  My challenge to the 1st Years was to embrace this focus and make it their own, using their wisdom to achieve balance between the two unacceptable extremes of ignoring their environmental impact on one hand and going to an extreme luddite over-reaction on the other.  Balance is needed if sustainability is to be sustainable.

FINANCIAL SUSTAINABILITY - if we are effective in improving environmental sustainability, then financial sustainability should also improve.  Unfortunately, however, the UWC model of education is a very expensive one - small classes, fully residential, extensive service program, bringing students from all around the world to learn together, and so on.  I have been told that for the same cost as educating one student in a UWC for two years, we could build a small primary school in Tanzania.  The reason that people donate the money for scholarships to UWCs is that they believe one (and every) UWC graduate has more potential to change the world for the better than building an entire primary school.  That is quite a responsibility!  My challenge to the 1st Year students was to ensure that the hope and the money invested in them is well placed.

PERSONAL SUSTAINABILITY - every UWC student has been selected in their home country on the basis of their merit, including their integrity and their idealism.  My challenge to the 1st Years is to ensure that their integrity and idealism are never diminished.  This is important, because every decision that we make, big and small, changes the person that we are.  For example, a student who lies or gives a false excuse for handing in a late assignment diminishes the quality of their personal integrity - and the more they do it, the more ‘normalised’ it becomes.  A student who breaches the trust placed in them by not following a College Rule dilutes their personal integrity, whether they are found out or not.

One of the most important areas for students to promote personal sustainability is ensuring that they get enough sleep.  There are so many demands made upon our students’ time and so many great opportunities to socialise that sleep is sometimes the first thing to suffer.  However, our College doctor has reported that 80% of the sickness suffered by our students can be traced back to insufficient sleep.  As I said to the 1st Year students “by the time you leave LPCUWC, I can guarantee you will have learned how to manage your time - but whether you learn this the easy way (by taking control of your sleep from the very beginning) or the hard way is up to you”.

I hope our new students rise to the challenges of the three sustainabilities.  If they do, then they will certainly have justified the hopes and aspirations that so many people around the world have placed in them.