‘Don’t Teach. Strike’: Professors Join the Fray as Millions Prepare to March Against Climate Change

Hundreds of professors concerned about the impact of climate change have a message for their colleagues this Friday: “Don’t teach. Strike.”

Students, faculty, and staff at American colleges and universities are poised to join millions across the globe who are expected to walk out of classrooms and offices to pressure world leaders into viewing climate change as a serious threat and to demand an end to the use of fossil fuels.

It’s all part of Friday’s Global Climate Strike, a day of action spearheaded by the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. Although the movement is primarily youth-led, more than 700 professors and teachers have signed an open letter in support of the strike, calling it their “most important lesson plan.”

Jonathan T. Isham, an economics and environmental-studies professor at Middlebury College, in Vermont, is a founder of The Educators’ Climate Strike, a group that’s calling on professors to cancel classes and participate in the hundreds of local demonstrations set to take place on Friday.

“Greta Thunberg has it right,” Isham said. “This is an emergency unlike anything we’ve ever seen. And the time for action was yesterday. But since yesterday’s passed, it’s now. Today.”

In an op-ed for The Guardian, Isham and Lee A. Smithey, a professor of peace and conflict studies and sociology at Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, urged their colleagues to scrub their lesson plans and join their students in supporting “the defining cause” of their generation.

“To strike in the name of climate justice is a resounding endorsement of learning: It turns out the world’s youth have been listening to their teachers all along,” they wrote. “They understand the science of climate disruption; they take in the lessons of history; they grapple with the complexity of market forces and the true costs of polluting.”

Many college administrators, for their part, have tried to strike a balance between supporting their students and maintaining business as usual. Middlebury faculty members will have the discretion to drop classes and join their students, who will be walking out during morning classes and meet at the town green for a demonstration. Staff members must request a day of personal time off in advance, according to an all-staff email from Karen L. Miller, vice president for human resources.

Miller stressed that those approving time-off requests should keep in mind the college’s need to “maintain normal operations.”

But for Isham, sacrificing an off-day is “a pretty good bargain.”

Middlebury’s faculty members won’t be the only ones in Friday’s strike. In Indiana, faculty and staff at DePauw University plan to join students in a demonstration at the campus’s heart before taking the rally to the courthouse square in Greencastle, Ind.

“Everyone should attend the strike,” Jim Mills, a geosciences professor at DePauw, said in a news release. “Rapid climate change affects us all. Students are facing a lifetime of changing climate that is going to require some very hard decisions on their part to deal with this. This will also impact their children, grandchildren, and so on — if we don’t start making changes now.”

A DePauw spokesman said he wasn’t certain how many classes had been canceled, but the university respects the rights of “all on our campus” to express themselves.

A ‘Broader Story’

The Global Climate Strike comes at a time when many colleges and universities are taking a hard look at how they contribute to climate change.

Isham cited the University of California’s decision on Tuesday to divest its endowment and its pension fund from fossil-fuel companies — a move that added the university system to a growing list of institutions that have divested in recent months. On Thursday the UC system also joined a coalition of more than 7,000 colleges and universities that have signed a climate-emergency declaration.

“That’s a kind of support for the broader story here, which is engagement by academic leaders in the climate-crisis spike,” Isham said. “So I would say, in the broader context, we see that support, increasingly, all around the world, and certainly in our corner of Vermont.”

At Swarthmore, where students have been campaigning for years for the college to divest its fossil-fuel holdings, Smithey canceled classes so his students could rally both on the campus and in nearby Philadelphia. As a professor, he said, he looks forward to the chance to learn with his students.

“I’m hoping students begin to feel empowered by adults beginning to stand with them,” Smithey said. “And I believe this is part of a much larger process.”

In New York City, where the stage is set for one of the world’s largest planned climate strikes, Eban Goodstein plans to use his centrally located classroom to the advantage of his graduate students. The city just announced it would allow the 1.1 million students in its public schools to skip classes on Friday to attend the strike.

“We’re really just going to turn our students loose,” said Goodstein, director of Bard College’s Center for Environmental Policy, which is located on the college’s New York City campus.

Isham and Smithey understand the reservations that professors — and their bosses — might have over sacrificing a day of classes. But they see the day as an opportunity for students to take what they’ve learned in the classroom and apply it. It’s a teachable moment, of sorts.

“Like all educators, I work with young people all the time,” Smithey said. “And when I see them looking ahead to their future with clear eyes — they’re really the realists among us in this moment.”

Lauren Fisher is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @lauren__fisher, or email her at lfisher@chronicle.com.