Bryan Alexander

How might higher education respond to the climate crisis?

One answer to this very large question is for a given campus to expand its academic teaching on the topic, across the curriculum.  A second answer involves expanding a college or university’s research work, also across the disciplines.  Over time, an institution’s commitment to building and sharing global warming knowledge increases.

As an alternative, we can imagine the creation of climate programs within larger universities.  Or in a more ambitious way, by creating an entire climate institution.  I speculated about this in my recent book, Universities on Fire, forecasting that “entire graduate schools and undergraduate colleges specializing in the climate crisis appear…” (4) Later on in the book I added:

Looking decades ahead, we can imagine an academy increasingly devoted to studying the Anthropocene through familiar academic departments and new ones. Depending on an institution’s nature and strategy, we may forecast new forms for such work: centers, institutes, academic programs, colleges within universities, entire standalone colleges and universities devoted to researching the topic.   (86; emphases added)

That is precisely what New York state recently announced.  Stony Brook University will lead the construction of the New York Climate Exchange on Governor’s Island.

According to the Stony Brook official page as well as the New York Times’ article, the Exchange has several distinct yet interconnected functions.

From the project renderings page.

Research and development This is how the Stony Brook page leads off, describing the Exchange first of all as “a first-of-its-kind international center for developing and deploying dynamic solutions to our global climate crisis.”  R&D appears to be key.

It’s still early days, but the Stony Brook FAQ offers a list of potential research topics:

The Exchange will tackle the most important elements of the climate challenge: air, water, food, and energy studies. Some initial areas of focus include:

• Green infrastructure for coastline resilience
• Electric vehicle-to-grid integration
• Circular organic waste management
• Climate resilient hydroponics
• Data visualization of extreme event impacts
• Policy strategies for implementation of solutions
• Advanced aquaculture for urban food security and carbon capture

Teaching One part of the new school’s pedagogical function involves teaching undergraduates and grad students.  Stony Brook makes it sound like its own branch campus:

The Exchange is an opportunity to amplify and expand the research already being done at Stony Brook in the areas of climate and sustainability. It will also offer a Climate Solutions Fellows program for graduate students, a Climate Solutions Semester for undergraduates

I’ve written that climate teaching should be interdisciplinary, and Stony Brook agrees:

Climate solutions are not limited to the so-called hard sciences and require an “all-of-the-above” approach including across the humanities, social sciences and healthcare. The Exchange envisions many interdisciplinary projects on Governors Island and welcomes ideas and inspiration from all fields of study. Additionally, we expect that the arts will be well-represented through performances, art installations, and other possibilities.

More teaching: workforce development The curricular strategy sounds based on jobs for the immediate community, with the Exchange “host[ing] job-training and skills-building programs for local residents to help them launch successful careers that improve our regional environment.”

Indeed, Stony Brook belabors the point, emphasizing that the Exchange isn’t a liberal arts space so much as a job training center:

The unique purpose of The Exchange will be to bring together the voices of all stakeholders so that solutions to our climate crisis are not just academic or theoretical, but social and practical — including research that becomes commercially viable and ideas that lead to immediate action on the local and global levels.

(Readers of American higher education history will recognize this centuries-old argument about theoretical versus practical teaching)

The Times article describes a statistical emphasis on workforce: “The campus will create more than 2,200 jobs, city officials said, and eventually serve 600 college students, 6,000 job trainees…”

One of Midjourney’s efforts on the topic.

Rethinking campus operations In addition to conducting higher education’s classic functions of teaching and research, the enterprise will experiment with its operations as part of its climate focus. “The design and operations of The Exchange itself will serve as a model for sustainability with a carbon-neutral facility that blends into the natural landscape of Governors Island.”

One goal is to be electrically sustainable.  According to CBS:

“It’s going to be covered with solar panels and have geothermal energy. So it will not need electricity from the grid at all. In fact, it’s going to give electricity back into the grid,” said Claire Newman, president and CEO of the Trust for Governors Island.

Blending these functions It sounds likely that climate study will cross institutional domains.  For example, the New York Times mentions that “[t]he climate hub will serve as a ‘living laboratory’ that features resilient design.”  I imagine faculty research, student inquiry, and the campus physical plant all involved.

Stony Brook offers this sketch of topics which can be integrated across those domains:

Environmental Justice and Inclusion

Reconciling global inequities, reducing burdens, distributing benefits more fairly, and redressing past discriminatory practices and their impacts.

Climate Interdependence

Adopting the “nexus” approach to sustainable climate change solutions with emphasis on the connection between the critical ecosystem domains of water, food, and energy.
Sustainable Urban Environments

Developing and demonstrating sustainable, affordable solutions for coastal urban environments, starting on Governors Island and extending outward into New York and beyond

How is this funded and supported?  The Times describes several sources:

About $150 million in funding will come from previously allocated city capital funding, city officials said. Another $100 million is from the Simons Foundation, founded by the billionaire James H. Simons, and $50 million will be contributed by Bloomberg Philanthropies, founded by Mr. Bloomberg, a longtime supporter of rebuilding the island. The consortium will raise another $400 million and cover operational costs…

Additionally, the Exchange has a lot of partners from academia, the corporate world, and local non-profits.

Things are in the planning stage now.  Construction itself won’t begin until 2025.  The Times thinks it’ll open for business in 2028.

One criticism of this project comes from Scotland’s Donald Clark, who sees the construction as flying in the face of climate change’s needs:

Let’s solve our carbon footprint problem by ‘building’ another campus in an island…. head, table, thump….

It has long been the knee-jerk reaction in Higher Education to shove up buildings, as if that were the solution to a problem. In this case, it’s exacerbating the problem.

Let's solve our carbon footprint problem by 'building' another campus in an island…. head, table, thump….

— Donald Clark (no flags, no hashtags) (@DonaldClark) May 15, 2023

It has long been the knee-jerk reaction in Higher Education to shove up buildings, as if that were the solution to a problem. In this case, it's exacerbating the problem.

— Donald Clark (no flags, no hashtags) (@DonaldClark) May 15, 2023

I share Clark’s concern, as the Twitter exchange shows.  It also reveals a split in academic thinking about global warming.  One side follows the historical pattern of recognizing new or expanding academic endeavors by creating new material expressions (buildings, campuses, sites), infrastructure (jobs, programs), and by hiring people.  Against this is the broader economic thinking we see from no-growth and de-growth advocates, who would see us shrink our footprint, especially the richest “us.” Within American academia we could align this with the decade-running enrollment decline, or the so far scarce idea of deliberately shrinking a campus footprint (cf Gordon Gee’s recent move).

I’m also worried about how the thing will actually get built, given the enormous problems of building anything in the New York City area (cost overruns, delays, scope creep, etc).

At the same time I’m impressed by this group of partners committing themselves to creating an academic entity dedicated to the climate crisis.  There’s a lot of potential there, both locally and in terms of R+D for the world.

Are there any similar academic entities in the world?  How many more should we anticipate?

On this Earth Day 2023 I’m thinking of many things.  My ongoing research into higher education and the climate crisis fills my mind with the sprawling dimensions of the problem: rising sea levels versus campuses, academic research and activist students, desertification and infrastructure.

This day can be compromised, of course.  There’s a commercialization of it under way. It’s also a good opportunity for greenwashing.  Yet I’m thinking of its basic idea, the appeal for Earth consciousness as well as its call to action.

(This will be quick, as I’m caught between work and a family trip.)

What should we do, in academia?

I think of the academics – faculty, staff, students, etc. – for whom climate change is not a call to action.  It’s part of the background hum of 21st century life, one piece of the very large strategic mosaic.  Thinking and planning about it can be outsourced in many ways: to a sustainability officer, some environmental studies faculty, to insurance companies.  It doesn’t merit proactive steps.  We have a *lot* of other things on our collective plates, and all too often have to address them with fewer resources and less support.  Many people are exhausted from the past few years of pandemic, politics, precarity.

I hear this, especially the last point about exhaustion.  Such has been the lot of too many academics before the pandemic and Trump, but I’m glad to see the issue in the mainstream now. Yet thinking ahead – remember, I’m a futurist – I have to anticipate the ways the climate crisis can impact colleges and universities when we don’t take proactive steps.

In Universities on Fire I describe three levels of potential impact.  They vary from location to location, by institutional structure, by the complexity of Earth systems, and over time, but in general they start with the direct damage caused by natural events.  Storm surges, floods, storms of all sorts, drought, fire, desertification, aridification, dangerously high temperatures, dangerously high wet bulb temperatures, and more can all hit campuses.  At a second level we see followup natural effects as global warming proceeds: diseases moving to new areas, current flora and fauna fading away and being replaced by new life, agriculture under stress, etc. At a third level we have the many ways humans respond to the crisis. Government policies (pro- or anti-climate), business actions, the positions of nonprofits, the behavior of all of us as residents, consumers, voters, activists, growing numbers of climate refugees… all of these can press upon a given college or university in many ways over the years to come.  Starting now.

Put another way: if academics don’t want to think and act about climate change now, we’ll have do in the future.

I’ve previously identified several domains for academic action.  We can rethink and redesign the physical campus, from buildings to grounds, electrical power to transport, food service, and more.  We can expand our climate-oriented research enterprise, across the disciplines, perhaps surfacing new fields.  Our teaching can grow, from infusing classes with climate examples and consciousness to creating new courses, degrees, and programs. We can do more with our immediate communities in many ways, from energy partnerships to service learning and applied research. And academics can pick up a more public role, sharing research and teaching broadly, as well as doing activism.

Today images of the Earth will be widespread.  For some of us they’ll give a taste of the overview effect, that reframing of thought to consider the entire planet as a whole.  (For others this is a bad thing; such may be the subject of a next book.) These images make me think of higher education as an entire sector, all 20,000 institutions or so, all the millions of us, together, and wonder what our collective role is.

Because the climate crisis is a radical and vast thing, potentially, a gigantic rethink of human civilization and identity.  We are starting to reconsider our economic model, our politics, our food systems, what progress means, what it means to be humans. We are starting to build a new civilization from the guts of the current one. Surely this is a clarion call for academic involvement.  If the climate crisis is as vast an issue as most scholars and activists think, an event and process on the scale of the industrial revolutions or World War II, what is the ethical response of a professor, librarian, students, grants officer, scholarly publisher?  Are we not called to take a hand?

And think of what academics have to offer!  The immense intellectual horsepower that has already powered so much climate understanding.  The amazing opportunity to teach a generation or two of the human race. The potential to aid our communities and the entire world.  Higher education has a unique and powerful position in the unfolding crisis.  How, then, should we act?  What should we do?

Happy Earth Day, all.

(first photo by Burnt Pineapple; second photo by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center) Continue reading →

I started writing this from the Denver airport, on the way to Colorado College, where I presented on colleges in the climate crisis.  I noodled further at different points on the next trip, to the University of Wisconsin-Stout, where I addressed their Effordability Summit.  These are my first stops on the Universities on Fire book tour – and reach out if you’d like to host me!

Speaking of climate change, I’d like to share a fascinating story about a growing problem at one university.  I am not so much interested in the affair itself but more in how it potentially signals things to come.  I’m still traveling, so this won’t be long.

The story concerns Harvard* law professor Jody Freeman, one of whose specialties is environmental law. From what I’ve seen she looks committed to addressing climate change.  Yet at the same time she sits on (and is paid for sitting on) the board of ConocoPhillips, a major fossil fuel company, recently in the news for winning the Biden administration’s approval to expand operations in Alaska.

This board position has elicited conflict of interest charges on campus.  To begin with, the Guardian article describes faculty criticizing what they see as a contradiction: “Colleagues say Freeman’s fossil fuel ties raises serious questions about a conflict of interest, while threatening to damage the university’s climate credentials.”  A leaked email develops the point further:

[Harvard’s] Salata Institute asserts it ‘will not accept funds from, or partner with, any company that does not share the goal of moving our global economy away from fossil fuels,’ [so] we ask: why does this policy not exclude awarding funds to a board member of one of the world’s most intransigent fossil fuel merchants?

And:

We ask not only about a potential conflict of interest, but also about the appearance of a conflict of interest, particularly one that might damage Harvard’s reputation and impair its efforts to be a leader in climate and sustainability work … might not intellectual partnership with a faculty member who has a fiduciary responsibility to a secondary interest, ConocoPhillips, with its mission to ‘explore for, develop and produce crude oil and natural gas globally,’ suggest a conflict of interest with these goals?

Approached by the Guardian, professor Freeman stood her ground:

I share the goal of moving the world to a low-carbon future as fast as possible and forcefully addressing the enormous challenges posed by climate change. There are many ways to make a difference, and activism is very important. I have chosen to engage in several ways, including by being an independent director on the board of ConocoPhillips to help advance the transition to a low-carbon economy, and think my involvement there remains positive.

At the same time, some students have fired off their own critique.  From Divest Harvard’s open letter the main charge is uselessness and hypocrisy:

ConocoPhillips is not listening to sound environmental policy advice: ConocoPhillips is listening to the call of profit without regard for climate degradation. The time has come to choose between your Harvard leadership responsibilities and your loyalties to the fossil fuel industry…

Professor Freeman, until now, you have justified your position as helping reform ConocoPhillips from the inside. The Willow Project makes clear that this isn’t working.

The students add greenwashing to their charges:

At a certain point, it is important to ask yourself whether you are being used — if ConocoPhillips isn’t paying for your expertise, but instead co-opting the respect and legitimacy accorded to someone of your position.

There is also an eye-watering point about board compensation, which, if true – wow.

To be clear, I am not writing about this developing story in order to judge Freeman’s actions.  I don’t have enough knowledge to go on beyond what I’ve shared and linked above.  Instead, I want to consider the controversy as a sample of emerging academic climate politics.

To begin with, there are some significant and direct connections between fossil fuel companies and academia. Some companies and their representatives (for example, the Koch brothers) fund faculty positions, programs, and research to various degrees of transparency. We recently saw some impressive documentation on this point. In addition, we may see some parts of higher education contributing to global warming by encouraging students to work for such companies, as those with petroleum engineering degrees often do. Further, and this is especially germane for Harvard, the few colleges and universities which maintain large endowments sometimes invest funds in companies like ConocoPhillips (hence divestment campaigns).

These connection may increasingly drive institutional political struggles, as more academics become more conscious and active on climate issues, as the crisis worsens in the world, and as general interest rises.  Think, for example, how a much more climate-active student body like the University of Barcelona’s would respond to learning about professor Freeman’s paid board gig.

Now, such struggles might not happen in all cases.  The relevant information might not get out.  Or it might appear, yet not get traction.

The second and more important form this could take it when some academics (faculty, also staff and students) determine than one or more other academics are knowingly contributing to the climate crisis.  Such contributions might appear in a variety of ways: a professor taking money from oil companies, as above, but also one whose research discourages climate action, at least in the accusers’ view, such as that conducted by a petroleum engineering professor. It might be an administrator who flies a great deal, when they could have taken trains and/or done virtual meetings instead.  It might be a cafeteria manager or the leaders of a frat house which serve a lot of beef, hence contributes to global warming through both methane and carbon dioxide emissions.  More simply, some academics could charge others with outright climate denial.

These challenges may be contestable, as they are based on interpretation, politics, and to some extent forecasting.  Additionally, as the crisis worsens over the years and decades ahead, other climate positions might become susceptible to critique, like an administrator seen as not pressing strongly enough for climate action, or a faculty member deemed as not having enough climate content in their curriculum.

I’ve been speaking of individuals, as is the case with the Harvard professor, but these forms of criticism can readily scale up to units: departments, programs, divisions, entire institutions.

Now, these are all internal possibilities, when members of the academic community critique each other.  Obviously academics can become objects of non-academic climate ire.  Climategate, where conservatives charged faculty with lying in order to spur climate action, offers one model, but we should also anticipate the reverse, when off-campus climate activists critique faculty, staff, or even students for expressions and actions which exacerbate global warming.  For example, I found the students’ open letter on a conservative website.

Looking ahead, as the climate crisis ratchets up and academics gradually become more active in it, we should expect more stories like this.

*Note: I do not consider Harvard to be an exemplary academic institution, given its extraordinary wealth and reputation. Yet its leadership role in academia, especially in the United States, is strong, and stories like this one might influence political conflicts in other universities.  Harvard reliably attracts outsized attention from the rest of academia and from the media. Perhaps this story is an early sign of things to come.