It is a cliché to point out that good intentions all too often lead to bad policies. Nevertheless, it remains true, including in the world of higher education. The past decade has shown us time and again that the pursuit of certain social or political goals ends up undermining the central mission of the university and restricting free speech on campus.
One such goal is environmental sustainability. This is not typically viewed as a significant force within the academy. Of course, universities, like other institutions, make pledges to work towards achieving net-zero, sorting rubbish, recycling and so on, but these projects are rarely considered direct threats to academic freedom.
However, the mantra of “sustainable development” has crept steadily into university policy documents and even the curriculum. CAF recently reported that the Quality Assurance Agency recommended that achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals be one of the central goals of higher education. But the QAA is far from alone in pursuing this goal.
An organisation called People & Planet produces an annual league table for universities based on their “environmental and ethical performance”. This is not merely a measure of how much renewable energy each institution uses or the effectiveness of its recycling schemes. It is a systematic review of each university’s public policies on environmental and ethical matters, as well as information from the Estates Management Record, published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
Higher education providers are evaluated on a whopping 14 different factors, ranging from Carbon Reduction and Sustainable Food to Workers Rights and Ethical Careers and Recruitment. Having scored universities on each of these sections, People & Planet then rank the 149 institutions, dividing them into grade levels First Class, Two-One, and so on. While some categories of evaluation are directly focused on environmental concerns, others have serious negative implications for academic freedom and institutional neutrality.
In the section “Education for Sustainable Development” or simply “ESD”, People & Planet explain that universities should be “proactive in main-streaming sustainability across the curriculum rather than simply promoting a sustainability department or stand-alone sustainability course”.
In particular, the markers for this section will be looking to see whether “a senior member of staff is championing ESD or whether ESD features within the university mission statement, teaching and learning strategy, strategic plan or other high level guiding documents”. Moreover, educators should actively encourage students to consider what “global citizenship” and “environmental stewardship” means in the “context of their own discipline and in their future and professional lives”.
As a recipient of the highest possible score in this category, King’s College London provides some examples of how ESD materialises in actual policy. The webpage cited by People & Planet’s details on the KCL score, explains that a “mandatory” component of the London institution’s “Education for Sustainability model” is “to ensure sustainability is part of every student’s core learning experience by 2026 and embedded in programme learning outcomes”.
Moreover, the KCL page proudly goes on to describe a new fund, which will “support King’s academic colleagues to integrate Education for Sustainability into their taught curriculum” and enable them to “carry this through to enact lasting curriculum change”. However, sustainability is not just about protecting the environment and combatting climate change, as demonstrated by the University of Leeds, which tied with KCL for first place in this category.
As part of its “Curriculum Redefined” programme, Leeds created a document entitled “How might we integrate sustainability and climate change into our learning and teaching?”. This instructs educators on how these themes “might be embedded across the curriculum, what we teach and learn, and how we do it”. The introduction explains that it “is important to note that this is broader than climate change and environmental considerations and also relates to equality and inclusion, decolonisation, belonging and well-being”.
Attempting to help academics live up to this new mission, the document asks them to consider if they “could include an objective for the module, which explicitly addresses reflection on links between your discipline and sustainability/SDGs?”. If this is too much, perhaps they could “link explicitly to the relevant SDGs in teaching sessions? Or dedicate a whole session/lecture to the links between your content and SDGs?” At the very least, they could “ask students to include explicit consideration of / reflection on how their research relates to sustainability in their dissertation”.
Naturally, it cannot all be about the environment, and so the same document adds that part of integrating “sustainability and climate change into our learning and teaching” at Leeds includes asking whether “our curricular practices [are] dominated by Eurocentric voices?” and if “we draw on ‘non-western’ and non-white forms of knowledge in our teaching?” These are the sorts of policies that get you a perfect score on “Education for Sustainable Development” from People & Planet.
However, P&P are not only concerned with what happens on campus, but also where the graduates go after they leave. Another measure of sustainable success is what the organisation calls “Ethical Careers and Recruitment”. As the methodology section explains “Sustainability and ethical considerations must be integrated into all elements of higher education institutions, and career services are no exception”.
As such, universities must ensure that their “careers service’s involvement with third-party organisations is conducted transparently and in a socially-responsible manner, not in opposition to wider environmental and humanitarian concerns.” In short: please do not let representatives from those nasty fossil fuels companies anywhere near your students. In fact, People & Planet insists that this commitment is reflected in the university’s official policy.
Once again, however, the environment is not the only concern when it comes to an “ethical career”. P&P also ask higher education providers to explicitly “screen out specific sectors […] from recruitment opportunities”, including mining, arms, and tobacco companies.
This recommendation has once again been taken to heart to the league’s top performers. Swansea University received a perfect score, partly for vowing that it “will not upload and will decline to approve any roles in [its] jobs board […] in oil, gas, tar sands, and tobacco companies”. Likewise, companies from these industries “will also be unable to access [the university’s] careers fairs and employer events”. Instead, the university promises to “actively promote ‘green jobs’”.
Putting aside the question of whether all jobs in mining and gas production (let alone ones in the tobacco and defence industries) necessarily have detrimental effects on the environment, it is a clear violation of institutional neutrality for a university to lecture its students on what an ethical career is.
This concept is clearly lost on some universities. Goldsmiths’ “Sustainable Careers Policy” paradoxically states both that it will “end the [fossil fuel] recruitment pipeline as a whole” by “restrict[ing] all job vacancies from oil, gas, mining, arms, or tobacco companies being advertised” and that it commits to “embedding the principle of impartiality into the design and delivery of career development services so that students and graduates have the freedom to develop their own career paths”.
The People & Planet league table indicates that several other higher education providers across the country have adopted ethical or sustainable career policies, actively restricting their graduates from considering certain industries. Suffice it to say that this is not the job of a university. Nevertheless, it is exactly the sort of policy that will be rewarded in the P&P rankings.
This was not always the case. Although People & Planet have ranked UK universities since 2007, the methodology has changed to the point of being unrecognisable. In its early years, the table, then known as “The Green League”, measured universities on four simple indicators, all directly related to their environmental impact and commitment to monitoring and improving their performance.
The focus of the P&P league has clearly shifted and its purpose been corrupted since its inception. No doubt the good intentions of saving the planet and improving society are still at the heart of the project, but the methods have gone astray. There is no good reason to incentivise universities to structure their curricula around the vague concept of “sustainability”, nor to tell their students which careers are ethical and which are not.
People & Planet is a private charity and it is, in principle, free to rank any institutions on any measures it wants, no matter how silly or counterproductive. We urge all British universities to ignore any encouragement to embed political goals in their curricula, and to let their students freely explore potential career paths for themselves.