Campus climate is the climate: The inseparability of sustainability and equity in higher education

What is it about?

This article, titled "No Justice Without Sustainability: Taking the Climate and Environment Literally in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Work," argues that the pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in higher education is inseparable from sustainability efforts. The authors assert that both DEI and sustainability can be understood as complementary principles of justice: social, climate, and environmental alike. In essence, this paper is a call to action for educators, leaders, and administrators to move sustainability, climate and environmental justice, and related urgent issues from the programmatic and contextual periphery closer to the heart of their work. As a practice brief, the authors outline recommendations for action, based on an interdisciplinary perspectives on climate, environment, justice, sustainability, transdisciplinarity, and higher educational leadership. The authors start by critiquing the prevailing anthropocentric focus in higher education studies, which often neglects the embeddedness of higher education institutions in the natural world. They argue that this neglect fails to account for the indivisibility of systems of human oppression from those of ecological depredation, which give rise to dispossession and marginalization. The authors then propose a shift in perspective, arguing that sustainability work and DEI work are necessarily intertwined in the higher education field. They posit that without a radical re-orientation of higher education institutions (HEIs) towards understanding their true relations with the land and the more-than-human world, HEIs may achieve incremental social justice but at the continued peril of our planet. The authors provide guiding principles and resources for action, recommending that DEI professionals and researchers develop a transdisciplinary praxis, collaborate, and advocate for structural changes through a whole institutional approach. They also emphasize the importance of community engagement and boundary-spanning activities.

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Photo by Ghiffary Ridhwan on Unsplash

Photo by Ghiffary Ridhwan on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Higher education leaders and scholars focus a lot of attention on the campus climate and learning environments that matter to access, transformative teaching, learning, and research, and college outcomes. Yet the actual climate and environment are often left as background context of these matters, when in fact climate justice and environmental justice are inseparable from the goals of higher education to foster social inclusion, opportunity, and liberation. The modern institution of higher education is on balance a greater driver and threat to planetary survival than it is a solution, without a radical reimagination of its relationship to humanity and the non-human world too. Simply put, sustainability is more than the greening of the curriculum, operations, and facilities. This article seeks to make this argument and outline principles and steps for educators to move justice and sustainability, jointly, from peripheral programmatic and operational initiatives to the heart of what higher education is and does.

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