As I write this, the West Coast is burning, farmers in the Midwest are picking up the pieces from the latest derecho, the Gulf Coast is recovering from a historic battering — everywhere we are faced with stark reminders that the pandemic is but a warm-up for what’s to come. A much larger crisis looms, one that our educational and political institutions are utterly unprepared for.
Covid-19 struck swiftly and relatively suddenly. With climate change, however, we have had decades to prepare. And yet, institutions with the power to enact substantive change have dragged their feet. Cities have made grand overtures to the gravity of the climate crisis — voting to declare a climate emergency or giving Greta Thunberg the key to the city — but have failed to pair these symbolic gestures with tangible action proportionate to the crisis at hand. Universities have done no better, often announcing hollow carbon-neutrality plans while maintaining robust investments in fossil fuels and even expanding fossil-fuel-burning infrastructure on campus.
We can gauge higher ed’s preparedness to handle the climate crisis by how it has handled the pandemic — which is why, frankly, we should all be terrified.
The climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic bear a number of similarities: Both represent catastrophic public-health crises; both disproportionately affect poor, non-white, and otherwise oppressed communities; both have wrought — and will continue to wreak — havoc that could have been avoided, or greatly mitigated, if people in power had taken them seriously. In both crises, moreover, institutions of higher education occupy a unique and critical position: Universities can either serve as models for decisive action and leadership, or they can meekly abide by the status quo and accept the devastating consequences.
At the very least, I think it’s safe to say we can gauge higher ed’s preparedness to handle the climate crisis by how it has handled the pandemic — which is why, frankly, we should all be terrified. It has never been clearer that to avert catastrophe, universities need to take drastic action, and they need to do it now. Yes, the middle of a deadly pandemic probably feels like the worst time to jump-start campuses’ transitions to carbon neutrality, but the opposite is actually true. Aside from outright denialism, a combination of institutional lethargy and the crushing pull of “business as usual” has traditionally made it seem all but impossible, even unimaginable, for universities to make any Big Changes on this front. But now, as public-health, enrollment, and jobs crises converge on higher ed, upending daily operations, change is not only possible but necessary for the sector’s very survival.
It’s not often that reality provides us such a clear, real-time lesson on the stakes (and costs) of institutional and societal inaction in the face of global crisis, but that’s precisely what this pandemic has done. While South Korea, Taiwan, and New Zealand handled outbreaks with astonishing success — putting in place strict containment rules and investing heavily in mass-scale testing, prevention, and hospital equipment — the catastrophically inadequate response of the U.S. government has resulted in national tragedy.
Of course, there have been exceptional examples of robust local responses in the absence of federal leadership (in Kansas, for instance, counties with mask mandates have seen considerable declines in coronavirus cases compared with neighboring counties without such mandates). Nevertheless, the takeaway is clear: Early, decisive action from the top down coupled with serious, upfront investment can save countless lives and substantially reduce public-health costs.
This rule also applies to institutional responses to climate change. Early investment in preventative efforts can radically alter the course of the crisis, and it just makes good financial sense: The World Health Organization estimates that, at a global level, the value of health gains resulting from decisive climate action now are roughly double the cost of mitigation efforts later. We know this already; the question is why we are not acting on it? Rather than taking our cues from meager, nonexistent, or even actively counterproductive federal responses, smaller scale institutions like universities can serve as both a catalyst and a model for decisive, progressive action.
Be it Covid-19 or climate change, universities are uniquely equipped to lead through a crisis. As centers of scientific research with a mission to serve the public good, they are well positioned and, indeed, obligated to translate this scientific knowledge into action at the local, national, and international level. Moreover, for all their faults, university administrations are not as vulnerable to shifting political whims as elected leaders (or contingent faculty, for that matter), and thus have more of the stability needed for effective long-term planning — if they choose to use it. And perhaps most crucially, well-established research universities have access to vast stores of capital, a portion of which could be mobilized for investments in measures that could very well save lives. (Granted, under the neoliberal model of higher education, dipping into these funds for investment in students has become a rarity; the University of Michigan, for example, has more than $6 billion available in unrestricted endowment funds but has refused to significantly tap it to fill funding gaps left by the pandemic, opting instead to raise tuition). This is to say nothing of the tremendous economic and political leverage big universities and university systems could have in spurring large-scale government action (the University of Michigan, to stick with the same example, is the second-largest employer in the state and has one of the most powerful alumni networks in the world).
As climate activists have argued for years, well-resourced institutions have both the ability and a moral imperative to take drastic action to curb greenhouse-gas emissions in ways that poorer institutions cannot. The scientific consensus is that the entire globe must reach carbon neutrality by 2050 — if universities with multibillion-dollar endowments don’t zero out their emissions decades before that, what hope do we have?
There is also a somewhat obvious but compellingly pragmatic point to make here: With campuses around the country closed, many students and staff gone, and universities in desperate need to carry out short- and long-term plans for achieving financial and ecological sustainability, now is as good a time as any to break ground on carbon-neutral infrastructure projects. The transition to carbon-neutral campuses will certainly be a heavy lift — from retrofitting buildings and installing on-site clean-energy generation, to transitioning bus fleets, installing bike-friendly infrastructure, etc. — and may entail significant disruptions to campus life. Indeed, climate activists are more than familiar with university administrators pointing to these logistical challenges as an excuse to do nothing, or very little. In the year of social distancing, though, that excuse doesn’t hold up. With many universities offering predominantly remote instruction, and a number deciding to not bring students back on campus at all, university buildings and grounds across the country are standing largely vacant. This isn’t a pie-in-the-sky suggestion. Many cities have used this opportunity to close streets to cars to improve walkability and expand outdoor seating, and some have already decided to make such changes permanent. Universities should follow suit — or, rather, lead the charge — and make the best of this moment to invest in our future before it’s too late.
As universities are forced to reckon with bleak financial circumstances, many will very likely (and understandably) object that making such investments is ill advised, if not impossible. But considerable evidence demonstrates that transitioning a campus to carbon neutrality can pay for itself in the medium term and can even end up saving the university money. Retrofitting old campus buildings with energy-efficiency improvements can considerably reduce energy costs, and on-site renewable-energy generation can cut costs even further. Colorado College, for example, which in January announced its successful transition to carbon neutrality, saved $6 million over the past decade through its sustainability initiatives. Middlebury College, which has stood at the vanguard of college climate action, saves between $1 million and $2 million per year in fuel costs by having switched to renewable sources.
But pigeonholing ourselves into an argument for fiscal responsibility misses the forest for the trees: Investment in carbon neutrality should also be understood as a first step in redefining the way higher education itself operates.
As a litany of articles have examined over the past several months, the pandemic has provided an excuse for universities, driven by an increasingly corporatized operational logic, to accelerate the rollout of austerity policies, in the form of furloughs, layoffs, and cuts in retirement funds. Meanwhile, exorbitantly paid, high-level administrators — who, at most universities, now resemble the C-suite of a multinational corporation — have escaped unscathed. In short, the burden of the crisis has been borne almost entirely by the university’s most vulnerable workers.
But there is an alternative. This moment should be understood as one not just of crisis and collapse, but as a critical decision point. We are at a juncture: Universities can decide to chart a new path, reinvesting in higher education in a manner that supports students and workers while simultaneously blazing a path toward a more just (and livable) future. It is within our power to restructure campus finances and priorities and to remake higher ed into the ecologically, socially, and educationally sustainable institution it needs to be, beginning with decisive investments in achieving campus carbon neutrality.
Of course, nothing worth doing is easy. As the professor and organizer Sara Matthiesen explains, think-pieces and cogent arguments are not enough; this will require a fundamental realignment of power within higher ed, and that will not happen without a fight. Indeed, if there is any hope right now, it exists in the fact that, across the country, university workers are taking up this fight. Here in Ann Arbor, graduate students and residential assistants just concluded historic strikes to demand a safer and more justly administrated campus, targeting the interwoven public-health crises of the pandemic and campus policing. To keep that hope alive, climate organizers must continue working with campus labor and social-justice groups to hash out a unifying antiausterity, climate-justice agenda.
As the political scientist Thea Riofrancos recently argued, this moment of profound crisis presents a historic opportunity to either remake our world or to double down on the reckless mistakes that have brought us to the point of collapse — and it’s the kind of opportunity that we are not likely to see again. This is as true for higher ed as it is for society writ large: If we recognize and seize upon the radical possibilities of this moment, we can fix this.
The federal government’s catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic should be a final wake-up call for all of higher ed: Universities have a chance to lead, and to do so by advancing toward a future worth living in. In this moment, universities — having long cast aside their public obligations in favor of chasing prestige and fattening endowments — have the chance to realign themselves with their core missions. We cannot waste that chance.