How campuses might act on climate change: a new framework

How might academia grapple with the climate emergency over the next years and decades?

Today I’d like to offer a simple schema to start conversations. Some of you know I’ve been research this topic for years (Universities on Fire is available for pre-order!). Now I want to share a quick and productive (I hope) way into the topic.

The schema has four pieces. Each one embodies and imagines one strategic direction a college or university could take. That’s a general way of understanding its allocation of scarce resources, including money, labor, and attention. It can represent a whole institution or parts of it.

The parts are Conservation, Adaptation, Mitigation, and Migration.

• Conservation A campus focuses its resources on maintaining itself into the future. Its population, from senior administration to students, may or may not see that future as meaningfully shaped by the climate crisis. The vision of what these academics seek to conserve may be drawn from the present or recent history. It could also be partial, neglecting some details — i.e., a focus on one swath of the curriculum, for example. We could imagine an alumnus wanting to conserve the business program, their fraternity and sister sorority, plus the school’s sports teams, while a current student hopes to see the physical campus and the undergraduate program persist, etc.
• Adaptation The institution recognizes the deep and present threat of the climate…