The Great Un-Wokening Meets the Campus Resistance

Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on March 17, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.

Many of America’s large corporations are beating a retreat from their former commitments to saving the planet from catastrophic climate change. They are also reassessing their earnest allegiance to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies. Indeed, the whole apparatus of ESG (“environmental, social, and governance”) policies in the for-profit sector now looks a bit like the Pacific Palisades after the fire. Not just climate and race stuff, but other progressive causes, including “gender diversity” and “aspirational hiring,” are facing early retirement.

The list of companies that are participating in what might be called the Great Un-Wokening is impressively long and, in its way, diverse. State Street (asset management), Warner Bros. (mediocre movies), Paramount (“A Mountain of Entertainment”), Goldman Sachs (investing in everything), BlackRock (ditto), Citigroup (more of the same), Pepsi and Coca-Cola (carbonated beverages), Google (advertisement emporium) and Disney (worse-than-mediocre movies and overpriced theme parks) stand out, but the list is much longer.

Exactly why an epidemic of sanity has broken out in the corporate world is a topic for wiser heads than mine. It could be that these companies are tired of squandering money on silly ideological crusades, or it could be a collective reawakening to the wisdom of Adam Smith.

Great shifts in the capital spirit seldom occur without responsive echoes in the American academy. And, indeed, in the behavior of some colleges and universities, echoes of the Great Un-Wokening can be discerned. What is especially interesting, however, is how faint these echoes are. It is as if higher education wants to play along with State Street et al., but its heart isn’t really in it.

For the most part, American universities remain committed to their strategies for fighting global warming by reducing their “carbon footprints,” and they remain as enthusiastic as ever about the Paris Climate Agreement, the international treaty that spins an amusing tale replacing physics with politics. But, here and there, we can spot some slight softening of the hard line on climate change.

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Last year, for example, Duke University announced that it had “fulfilled its 2007 pledge to become carbon neutral by the year 2024.” The pledge itself was a typical virtue signal at the height of global warming hysteria. If we all stop producing carbon, so the fairy tale goes, the global temperature will stabilize, and human survival —along with that of other species—will be more likely. There were always niggling doubts about this premise. Even if carbon emissions drive catastrophic global warming, the portion of emissions coming from Duke University is a minimal part of the whole. The whole of the United States, for that matter, accounts for a mere 12.6 percent of CO2 emissions, compared to China, which officially accounts for 33 percent—and unofficially a lot more.

But a more-than-niggling doubt arises from the absence of any real evidence that atmospheric carbon is any significant factor in global temperatures. We’ve gone from carbon dioxide having composed 300 parts per million of the atmosphere to a little over 400 parts per million. That’s a large percentage increase of a tiny amount, and it requires both fancy theorizing and a good deal of data manipulation to get to a cause-and-effect scenario. Zealous academic researchers working hand-in-glove with equally zealous federal regulators and still more zealous international agencies (e.g. the International Panel on Climate Change) helpfully conjured the necessary tables.

Maintaining this elaborate fiction, however, has been like keeping belief in the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot going. The occasional blurry photo, the testimony of an excited hiker, or a muddy footprint are all that are needed to keep enchanted hopes alive. After all, no one can positively prove that Nessie or a hominid with size-XXXXXL trotters don’t exist. So they just might. In the world of “climate science,” this is called “the precautionary principle.” We can’t prove carbon emissions cause catastrophic global warming. Heck, we can’t prove any really significant global warming without retroactively adjusting temperature records. But if there is any chance at all of a looming catastrophe, we had better go on a carbon-starvation diet right now.

Duke University bought this nonsense—and declared so proudly—in 2007, putting itself in company with the likes of Michael Mann and Greta Thunberg. It would be painfully awkward to walk this back the year in which the bill came due, 2024, when “carbon neutrality” was to be reached. The better answer would be to declare victory. So, in the well-established spirit of climate manipulation, Duke found that its “investments in renewable energy” and its “high-quality carbon offsets” added up to carbon neutrality. The press release announcing this achievement comes with color graphs showing a 31-percent decrease in the university’s energy use since 2007, as well as its 232,000 “redeemed carbon offsets.”

It’s science! Or, at least, “science.”

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To be fair, some of the capitalist corporations have played similar games. But, at this point, it might be worth noting that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency that has played the largest role in “recalibrating” data to make global warming appear real and significant, has begun to discharge its employee magicians.

I don’t mean to single out Duke for this sort of hypocrisy. It is widespread. “Carbon offsets” have been a key ingredient in most of the fantastic commitments to achieving carbon neutrality. But, as far back as 2008, the University of California’s Berkeley Center for Environmental Public Policy attempted to find evidence that carbon offsets actually work. The center’s Berkeley Carbon Trading Project came up with close to zero evidence that the so-called offsets reduce “greenhouse gas emissions.” Yet that lack of evidence hadn’t stopped the University of California from declaring in 2013 that it too would achieve “carbon neutrality” by 2025.

How has that worked out? It depends, of course, on whom you ask. UC Merced declared in 2020 that it had beat the deadline in 2018—seven years ahead of schedule. And it had done so with “a lengthy and rigorous review by independent auditors.” Its success was supposedly due to the campus being full of new construction that incorporated all the latest energy-saving technology. I have no reason to doubt the achievement, but I would note the enormous costs that California’s taxpayers footed. Moreover, the same environmental movement that drove this expenditure also played a significant part in preventing the removal of brush, controlled burns, and the building of dams and other water projects that would have forestalled the Palisades fire in January 2025—a fire that released 112 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, “equivalent to the carbon stored in the structural lumber of approximately 6.3 million average California homes,” according to the California Air Resources Board.

Which is to say that the University of California’s efforts to achieve carbon neutrality, even if perfectly done, are well-nigh meaningless in the net reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Perhaps it is a good thing that the goal itself is a phantom. But don’t tell the University of California that. As the 2025 goal for carbon neutrality approached, the university “adopted new, stronger climate action goals that prioritize direct emission reductions, limit the use of carbon offsets and align UC’s climate goals with those of the state of California.” The new goal is to severely limit natural gas combustion that accounts for 80 percent of the university’s remaining carbon emissions. Is it worth noting that natural gas is one of the cleanest burning fuels? Probably not. Climate hysteria feed upon itself.

Carbon neutrality is still a priority for much of American higher education, but it is actually only part of the larger political program known as “sustainability.” My organization began calling out the sustainability movement 15 years ago and published the study Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism (2015). I take some pride in the fact that no other organizations that keep an eye on mischief in the academy paid much attention to sustainability, which many mistook as a benign, pro-environment lobby. The movement’s architects, however, presented it as the frontier where global warming, environmental activism, social justice, and anti-capitalism were deployed in a united front.

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That hasn’t changed. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in collaboration with the American Council on Education (ACE), is currently seeking proposals from colleges and universities “to serve as the administrative and operational host of the Carnegie Elective Classification for Sustainability.” The request for proposals is overstuffed with jargon. A little will go a long way to show what the Carnegie Foundation is up to:

Sustainability is crucial now to address the climate crisis, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and the economic and social impact of climate change. It is key to fostering a fair and livable world for current and future generations, economic resilience, and public health. Higher education plays a vital role in advancing sustainability by educating future leaders, developing a workforce for the green economy, fostering innovation, and conducting solutions-based research to address environmental and social challenges. The deliberate and intentional actions of higher education in sustainability demonstrate institutional and systemic commitment to solutions-based action.

Got that? Let me translate: The Carnegie Foundation will pay good money for a college that combines its commitments to radical environmentalism and DEI. If you don’t quite catch the DEI program in those sentences, it appears more explicitly later on, when the document emphasizes the “voices of the underrepresented,” “indigenous knowledge,” “inclusivity,” and “diversity.”

As American colleges and universities reel under the Supreme Court’s decision in SFFA v. Harvard and President Trump’s cascade of executive orders against racial preferences and ideological indoctrination, a major push is underway to create an institutional order to protect higher ed’s version of the ESG agenda. The old sustainability movement lends itself fairly well to camouflaging the progressive agenda by presenting it as merely a continuing campaign for clean air and water.

Can “sustainability” sustain the indefensible? When even the Magic Kingdom, let alone BlackRock and Google, are headed for the exits, I suspect this effort to build a Great Wall will fail. The Mongol hordes of Un-Wokification are at the gates. In the spirit of multiculturalism, I would gladly hold open those gates, but I suspect that will be unnecessary. The effort to unite all the pieces of the left into one movement breathing the pure air of carbon neutrality is just another fantasy that American colleges and universities will soon have to set aside.

Image: “Craven Quad, West Campus, Duke University, Durham, NC” by Warren LeMay on Wikimedia Commons