Sustainability is an internationally-accepted goal, espoused almost universally by governments, multinational companies and places of learning but understood and enacted differently by each. Tertiary offerings in all fields are narrowing in scope to feed student demands for credentials, a phenomenon strongly evident in Australia's 'Enterprise' Universities (Marginson and Considine 2000). The ability to participate efficiently and ethically in decision-making about the environment requires a liberal environmental education, but no such characteristics are seen in the environmental programs in Australia. In addition, Geography, the most holistic and broad-based of disciplines, has declined in academic status with the demands for specificity.

Cosmopolitanism is an ancient Greek philosophy promoting the entire community of humans as the primary allegiance of all, above that of nations, companies or even families. The idea has been recently revisited (most controversially by Nussbaum 1994), and — if taught as a philosophy in concert with a broad education including spatial, historical and cultural contexts — has the potential to bring some of the focus of sustainability back to the pressing issues of intragenerational inequity. Interdisciplinarity is a problem-focused — often collaborative — academe where theory and methods from all relevant disciplines are integrated. Such broad-based education also gives the opportunity for peer-based learning that will better mimic institutional decision-making students will encounter in the future. Civics, the study of political and legal systems, is meant to prepare students for informed citizenship but is usually abandoned in secondary school. However, the ability to affect public policy is key to effective participation in debate about the environment (Dovers 1999). This paper will give background on these 'old' ideas, trace the circumvolutions to be found in the academic literature on them, and investigate some of the fallacies that stand in the way of using such approaches to transform university education for sustainability.