Month: November 2022

(This is the sixth entry in our series looking at the United Nations’ “2030 Agenda”. To read previous posts, scroll down, or type “SDGs” in the search bar.)

Like fashionistas taking cues from the Pantone “color of the year,”  most major private institutions now embrace some form of “sustainability,” whether in sports ( “NBA Signs UN’s Sports for Climate Action Framework“); entertainment (“At WarnerMedia, we are committed to integrating sustainability into all aspects of our business, content and culture globally”); health care (“Go green at CVS“); retail (“Costco Wholesale Corporation Sustainability Commitment”); financial services (“Bank of America: Our commitment to environmental sustainability”); or technology (Google has a “single mission — to foster sustainability at scale”).

“Sustainability” is the new black.

In education, we have seen that federal government efforts to measure progress on UN Sustainable Development Goal 4 (“Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”) and its associated “targets” (including “education for sustainable development” and “global citizenship”) have not been smooth. Nevertheless, the cult of sustainability is alive and well throughout education in the United States. Our first stop is higher education.

“Sustainability” at Top US Universities

To gauge the prominence of sustainability ideology at the university level, a review of the nation’s most prestigious schools is instructive. Of the universities ranked one through ten in the most recent U.S. News & World Report list, all have sustainability offices, goals, curricula, or plans of one sort or another (Princeton; MIT; Harvard; Stanford; Yale; University of Chicago; Johns Hopkins; University of Pennsylvania; CalTech; Duke; Northwestern). For most of these institutions, “sustainability” isn’t simply about recycling, or about reducing the school’s own “carbon footprint;” rather, it’s about both ecology and “equity,” and it concerns the content of both instruction and research. 

For example, MIT’s “Environmental Solutions Initiative” is weaving sustainability and environmental topics into classes required for graduation. Stanford cross-lists courses from its Doerr School of Sustainability within majors such as education, sociology, political science, and within the professional schools; the school says that “[a]cross our activities we are embedding equity, access, and inclusion.” Harvard’s efforts to become “fossil-fuel neutral” take account of “social equity.” Johns Hopkins’ “Office of Sustainability is part of a Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Working Group of the Ivy+ Sustainability Consortium [which] follows the guiding principles of Introspection, Anti-racism, Intersectionality, and Amplification.”

Among the top-rated schools, Yale is the most explicit about its efforts to align teaching and research with the UN’s 2030 Agenda and its SDGs:

In 2015, the Yale Office of Sustainability began looking at how teaching and research at Yale aligns with the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

[ . . . ]

Key Findings

Research at Yale University covers all of the Sustainable Development Goals
Every department or school has at least one faculty member whose scholarship relates to the SDGs
Yale has high participation in research relating to SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being), SDG 4 (Quality Education), SDG 10 (Reduce Inequality), and SDG 16 (Peace and Justice)

To arrive at this conclusion, Yale prepared a “comprehensive database of over 4,000 faculty members that provides insights into how Yale’s scholarly activities connect to the SDGs, [which] can be referenced, filtered, and used to foster connections and action.” The university’s Office of Sustainability memorialized its methods in a how-to guide, entitled “Assessing Research and Teaching Connections to the SDGs.”

According to the guide, this “comprehensive, up-to-date list of faculty members” excluded only emeritus and visiting faculty. (p. 3) It advises that any school adopting the Yale methods should have its “SDG Review Team . . . regularly track” faculty on their SDG alignment. (p. 7)

Though one would hope Yale values academic freedom, the guide notes (without irony) that “(f)aculty members may or may not appreciate being categorized by SDG.” (p. 9) The authors offer advice on how to avoid ruffling faculty feathers:

√ Tip: language matters! Avoid saying that their teaching or research “support” or “advance” an SDG. Use less direct terms like “connect to.”

The report notes proudly (p. 12) that 

Yale was also the lead author on the 2019 International Alliance of Research Universities online publication, Global Priorities, Educated Solutions: The Role of Academia in Advancing the Sustainable Development Goals and led half-day program of the same name in June 2019[.] 

That publication notes that the SDG “mapping” of faculty of the kind done by Yale “is not an absolute or prescriptive process” but “can be a fruitful conversation starter” for those academics who don’t view their work in SDG terms.  (p. 13.)

But perhaps no US institute of higher education promotes the SDGs as thoroughly and as publicly as Carnegie Mellon University.

Carnegie Mellon: SDG-U 

In 2021, Carnegie Mellon University (#22 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings) performed a (second!) full-scale “Voluntary University Review [“VUR“] of the Sustainable Development Goals”, looking at CMU’s “efforts to align [its] education, research and practice with the . . . SDGs” (p. 5). In fact, according to the report, CMU was the first university in the world to engage in such a review. (p. 9)

In 2020, CMU had engaged in a “17 Rooms” exercise, an initiative pioneered by the Brookings Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation to brainstorm ways for the school to support the SDGs (pp. 6, 12). That year, it released its first VUR, and the University Provost “participated in the UN Foundation and Brookings Institution’s side event at the United Nations General Assembly on ‘American Leadership on the SDGs.'” (p. 12) (Brookings and the UN Foundation are the “Force Multipliers” featured in Part Two of our series on the 2030 Agenda.) According to the VUR (p. 9; emphasis added),

While the SDGs include environmental stewardship challenges, they represent a paradigm shift in how the world thinks about sustainability that encompasses reducing inequality; creating peaceful, just and inclusive communities; reducing poverty and more.

CMU’s promotion of the SDGs includes:

• • • • Incorporating SDG information into fall 2021 student orientation (p. 11)
      • “Mapping” all classes “to all relevant SDGs” (p. 13)
      • Coding the “academic and research activities of faculty members” in an electronic profile that can be used to compare these activities to the SDGs (pp. 13-14)
      • Tasking undergraduates in a class on data analytics and research to “develop an automated approach to analyzing courses using the SDGs”, and offering data tools so the CMU community can “search 14,351 courses from fall 2019 to fall 2021 to see how they relate to the SDGs and make SDG-informed decisions about their courses.” (p. 16)
      • Highlighting “Early Adopters” among the faculty who identify where their work aligns with various SDGs (pp. 18-19)
      • Reaching out to student organizations to “educate [them] about the SDGs and encourage them to engage in the Sustainability Initiative” (p. 21)

Indeed, CMU professor Sarah Mendelson was one of three witnesses to testify at Congress’s “first ever” SDGs hearing on September 15, 2022 (see Part Two).

One could say Yale and Carnegie Mellon are definitely operating within the same “sustainability paradigm.”

From “Mapping” to the SDGs to “Conforming” to the SDGs?

Imagine you are a faculty member (at Yale, Carnegie Mellon, or any university following in their footsteps) whose courses and research projects don’t “map” well against the SDGs. What “actions” would your employer take? How would the “map” be used as a “conversation starter”?

“Mapping” research and course offerings against the SDGs – then making the results public in an “electronic profile” of faculty members – can only have one effect: to restrict future classes and research projects to those that fit the “sustainability” mold. In fact, that is exactly what UNESCO is urging universities to do in a recently-published report on “transforming higher education”:

The report calls on higher education leaders and actors to push for transformations within their institutions, using the report’s recommendations to critically reflect and act on their role for achieving the 2030 Agenda. Higher education institutions must take on a stronger role to tackle the world’s most pressing issues.

Knowledge-Driven Actions: Transforming higher education for global sustainability (from the “Short Summary”). Universities are to “reflect[] on what kinds of knowledge are necessary, [and] whose knowledge is needed” (Foreword by Stefania Giannini); to explicitly incorporate the SDGs into the classroom; and to allow the SDGs to shape research (pp. 82-83). Nevertheless, UNESCO disclaims any intention to restrict academic freedom:

The recommendations of this Global Independent Expert Group are not intended as a counterpoint to the ideals of curiosity-driven, basic research and academic freedom. Rather, HEIs [Higher Education Institutions] should wherever possible facilitate and engage in activities that promote the SDGs. In fact, we argue that it is those very HEIs as free institutions that have the motivation to lead societal change wherever needed to achieve the SDGs.

(p. 77) Perhaps UNESCO doth protest too much.

For an in-depth examination of the threat the “sustainability” paradigm poses to academic freedom in higher education (with a look at the paradigm’s Marxist underpinnings, as revealed in this UNESCO document), listen to Dr. James Lindsay’s New Discourses Podcasts on “The Strange Death of the University” Parts One and Two.

• • •

Although the US isn’t a member of UNESCO, the United Nations sub-agency primarily tasked with promoting the UN’s education agenda, the UN is not idle when it comes to promoting its vision for education in America. Our next look will examine efforts by the UN and others to promote the SDGs in K-12 education.