Thanks to a Freedom of Information (FOI) investigation, CAF has discovered that a major Scottish university is treating the contested concept of “sustainable development” as a teaching “enhancement” to be “embedded” across degree programmes, shifting the emphasis from critical scholarly inquiry towards evidencing affirmative engagement through activities designed to enable students to “value” the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework.
Abertay University’s publicly accessible Sustainable Development Strategy (2023–2030) sets out this approach in unusually explicit terms. “All individuals and organisations” are required, it states, to “urgently take action towards net-zero and a just transition”, while universities in particular “have a moral obligation to embed support for the SDGs as part of their social mission and core functions”.
“Through teaching and learning,” the strategy adds, “we will teach sustainability and empower our students with a genuine understanding of sustainability that they can use in all aspects of their lives”, including by “embedding sustainability concepts, knowledge and skills into our teaching curriculum and our quality enhancement processes”. The strategy links this ambition to the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and to the Scottish Funding Council’s Net Zero and Sustainability Framework for Action, which sets a net zero target of 2040-45 or before for all Scottish Colleges and Universities.
To establish how this ambition is being operationalised in programme-level documentation, CAF submitted FOI requests in January.
Among the papers disclosed was a Teaching & Learning Committee document from April 2023 explaining a change, effective from academic year 2023-24, to the Programme Annual Report template. A previous section asking programmes to identify “quality enhancements” would be “refocused” so the university could “understand where it stood on sustainability… within the curriculum.” Under the sustainability heading, programme teams were asked for “examples of activities that enable your students to value and engage with the UN Sustainable Development Goals… within their future professional and personal lives”, and invited to identify an exemplar they would be “proud to share with the Abertay community”. The same paper notes it was “encouraging” that ten programmes identified sustainability across each year of study, while a “very small number” that did not do so were highlighted in an annex.
CAF’s concern is not that sustainability is discussed in university teaching – that is a matter for individual academics. There is, however, an important distinction between encouraging debate about sustainability within disciplines, and requiring programme teams to demonstrate how they effectively promote that concept as part of routine monitoring.
“Sustainability” is not a purely technical competence, still less a politically neutral one. Different responses to climate change and environmental risk reflect different values and priorities, and recommending one approach over another inevitably involves political and economic choices.
Different responses to climate change and environmental risk reflect different values and priorities, and recommending one approach over another inevitably involves political and economic choices. As development scholars have long noted, the UN framework embodies one such approach, but there is no apolitical, purely “scientific” solution to questions of growth and its trade-offs, distribution and justice, or the weighting of competing goods.
Yet when students learning to “value” the UN’s SDGs becomes a reporting requirement, critical appraisal risks being displaced by a softer expectation of promotion and endorsement. Would academics who prefer to scrutinise the goals’ assumptions, trade-offs and politics be treated as failing to meet an institutional expectation? And what about staff working from a Marxist or postcolonial perspective who do not subscribe to the UN’s technocratic, faux-universalist vision – would they feel pressure to self-censor, or to perform agreement, in order to avoid professional disadvantage?
We note that in the disclosed documentation every example singled out for praise treated the UN framework as an inherent good rather than as an object of critique. The asymmetry is revealing.
What the FOI release didn’t make clear is whether this auditing is routine rather than episodic. CAF is therefore issuing a further round of FOI requests to establish whether “sustainability” is now being treated as a standing expectation across degree programmes, and what (if any) follow-up occurs when programmes do not record alignment.
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s monitoring of developments in UK higher education. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, click the link and subscribe to our newsletter.