NEW YORK, March 25, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — As United Nations delegates gather this week to negotiate new Sustainable Development Goals, the National Association of Scholars released the first major critical report detailing how the campus sustainability movement harms higher education.
Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism shows that the sustainability movement distorts college curricula and cuts off free inquiry on important questions. The 260-page report also shows that, at a time when tuition and student debt are soaring, colleges are spending lavishly on sustainability programs.
The study shows how the sustainability movement has shut down reasoned debate on campuses by foreclosing open inquiry about climate change. (The report takes no position on global warming itself.) The report criticizes the 685 institutions that have signed the American College and University President’s Climate Commitment for demanding of students and faculty members “blind obedience” in the place of critical examination of the facts.
The Greening of the Curriculum
Students can now earn credentials in sustainability in 1,438 distinct college programs, ranging from certificates to doctoral degrees. But sustainability is also a theme that has spread across the whole college curriculum, including seemingly unlikely subjects such as English composition, mathematics, and psychology.
“Harnessing higher education and the liberal arts into the service of sustainability seriously undermines their purpose,” said Peter Wood, co-author of the report and president of the National Association of Scholars. “It treats other disciplines as mere grist for the sustainability mill.”
What Sustainability Costs
The report examines how much colleges and universities spend to achieve their sustainability goals. Using Middlebury College in Vermont as a case study, the authors find that the costs far outrun the purported savings. Middlebury spends close to $5 million annually on sustainability efforts. The report estimates that American colleges and universities overall spend over $3 billion annually on sustainability-related programs and initiatives.
“Colleges and universities fail any test of transparency on the costs of sustainability,” said Wood. “Colleges routinely boast that their sustainability ‘investments’ save money, but they make these claims behind an opaque wall.”
The Nudge-Culture of Sustainability
Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism shows that many colleges and universities attempt to manipulate students into complying with sustainability goals. Students are not only bombarded with promotional material and pressured by peers, they are also manipulated with sophisticated programs designed by psychologists to “nudge” them into new patterns of behavior.
“The campus sustainability commitment represents a significant shift in higher education, away from giving students access to rational and moral knowledge that prepares them for wise, conscious choices, and towards training operations that elicit automatic responses,” stated Rachelle Peterson, co-author of the report.
Divestment: Sustainability’s Last Frontier
The study examines the growing demands by sustainability advocates for colleges and universities to divest their holdings in carbon-based energy companies.
“The fossil fuel divestment movement,” said Peterson, “is an exercise in futility. Its leaders fully understand that divestment, even if college trustees went along with it, would have no effect on fossil fuel companies or the environment. The divestment movement is really aimed at reinforcing the loyalty of students to the firebrands of the sustainability cause, who need a mass of followers in order to gain political leverage.”
About the National Association of Scholars
NAS is a network of scholars and citizens united by their commitment to academic freedom, disinterested scholarship, and excellence in American higher education. We uphold the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship.
(bold was mine) No trace of sugar-coating there, eh?
AEI’s Ben Zycher exposed the divestment movement’s misanthropic ‘logic’ in a post on Real Clear Markets: http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2014/10/15/the_breathless_hypocrisy_driving_energy_divestment.html.
Here’s the gist (with some embellishments of my own):
Fossil energy companies exist only because other industries — manufacturing, agriculture, telecommunications, etc. — require energy to create and deliver products and services. So if colleges have a moral imperative to bankrupt carbon-energy producers, they should dump all their stocks.
Nor is that all. Energy-consuming companies exist only because lots of people want their products and services and are wealthy enough to buy them. So if bankrupting Big Carbon is a moral imperative, divestment leaders should advocate growth-chilling taxes and regulations. Hey, many already do — what a coincidence!
Best of all, though, divestment leaders don’t have to wait the Republican-led Congress to act. The wealth creation responsible for the demand for carbon-fueled products and services utterly depends on human capital formation (acquisition of knowledge and skills). Obviously, then, universities should ‘divest’ the endowment and scholarship funds that enable millions of students from low- and middle-income households to pursue lucrative careers.
As the saying goes, misanthrope begins at home.
Agenda 21 in practice.
What most people don’t realise is that it was signed in by Bush senior and has bipartisan support
If you want to know the history of sustainable development ie. etc. you just have to peruse the sites and videos of Rosa Korie I have my favorite video of hers regarding sustainability, but she has many video interviews, but my favorite is:
Just look around her websites to find out about “sustainable development”
Here is one of her websites – you can look around and find out a lot about Agenda 21 and sustainable development:
http://www.postsustainabilityinstitute.org/who-funds-un-agenda-21.html
It is UN advocated, but implemented locally through ICLIE.
http://www.iclei.org/
I wish that Rosa Korie would join in the discussion here more often. Her website has very few comments. She would have a larger audience here.. She is aware of this website. There have been other agenda 21 issues here which she should have added top the tread – I’ m not sure why she has not participated…
Thank you An-y for a timely posting. In December of last year, I wrote to my university about my concern for the push to divest. I closed my letter by summarizing that the manmade global warming issue is far from settled and urged the university to follow a conservative path with respect to its investments rather than yielding to scare tactics that might financially impair future generations of students. Coincidentally, I had a meeting today with the dean of the college and gave him a copy of my December letter, plus excerpts of your NAS posting. I plan to follow up with an email with links.
Does anyone here know what sustainability is? Can sustainability be measured? Are there units for sustainability? Is is related to entropy in some way?
“Entropy is an extensive property. It has the dimension of energy divided by temperature, which has a unit of joules per kelvin (J K−1) in the International System of Units (or kg m2 s−2 K−1 in terms of base units). But the entropy of a pure substance is usually given as an intensive property — either entropy per unit mass (SI unit: J K−1 kg−1) or entropy per unit amount of substance (SI unit: J K−1 mol−1).
The absolute entropy (S rather than ΔS) was defined later, using either statistical mechanics or the third law of thermodynamics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
Or is it related to efficiency in some way? “Sustain” seems to suggest time. Do the units for sustainability contain a time dimension?
And if there are no units associated with “sustainability”, how is it measured? And if it cannot be measured, what is it?
Never fear, gregole. The UN has an app for that;-)
As I had noted – back in 2010 – one which they had developed (via a rather ciruitous and rambling route, as is their custom) and which came to full-fledged fruition – in no small measure, thanks to the heroic efforts of dedicated luminaries, such as TEEB’s Pavel Sukhdev.
Sukhdev may (or may not) have resiled from his oh-so-catchy mantra: “What you do not measure, you cannot manage”. Considering what I have not seen in the intervening years, I’m somewhat inclined to suspect not!
That being said, as far as I have been able to ascertain in the interim, to the best of my knowledge, there is absolutely no scientific definition of “sustainability”. Many mantras, monologues and mindless misperceptions … but zero, zip, nada on the “scientific” front.
Quelle surprise, eh?!
Oh, drat … once again, my kingdom for a WordPress spellcheck prior to posting. “…rather ciruitous …” should read “… rather circuitous …” (Memo to self: do not rely on that which you have composed via comment, prior to verifying via test on your own blog!)
Thanks Hilary! I was wondering if I had missed something…
Just divest from fossil fuel companies and invest in sustainable companies like solar cell makers; that will solve the headache of where to invest the money just beautifully, as it will quickly disappear.
http://notrickszone.com/2015/03/26/bloodbath-four-of-germanys-top-12-capital-destroyers-of-2014-are-solar-tech-companies-solarworld-no-1/#sthash.u28Ck99h.dpbs
Subsequently, socialist universities will disappear. Which is just as well.
‘The fossil fuel divestment movement, is an exercise in futility.’
If the National Association of Scholars actually wrote that they should be renamed as the National Association of Semiliterates.
Putting a comma between the subject clause and the main verb is totally wrong.
When I was in college ‘sustainability’ meant daisy-chaining two or more kegs so you wouldn’t have to stop in the middle of a party to tap a new one.
Who is NAS? I never heard of them. They have a small office in New York. Are they setting themselves up as the anti-Union of Concerned Scientists? Anyone know anything about their membership?
I mostly agree with their positions, which makes me suspect that not many academics would join. Anathema to them, as the Universities have turned into cesspools of liberal mendacity. Or maybe they (the Universities) always were?
Clearly any institution that dumped their FF stocks have saved billions of dollars in the last 6 months. May have been for the wrong reasons but at least they didn’t ride Peabody Coal from the low 20s to it’s current price of $5.05. You can also thank the big Wall St. brokers for their relentless downgrades and the over production of Natural Gas for the death of the coal industry. Equity owners will be wiped out but the bond holders will pick up the scraps. As you might guess Wall St. owns the bonds and will pick them up for pennies on the dollar.
I’m really pissed off at these guys for destroying a industry.
So much for the exorsize of utility.