Tag: hypocrisy

  • Challenging climate hypocrisy in higher education learning and teaching 

    Challenging climate hypocrisy in higher education learning and teaching 

    By Dr Adrian Gonzalez (@AGonzalez05) Senior Lecturer in Sustainability and Director of Learning and Teaching, Department of Environment and Geography at the University of York.

    Climate hypocrisy in Higher Education

    The climate crisis and global attempts at strengthening the sustainable and low-carbon transition is arguably the most critical issue we face and there is clear evidence to show strong Higher Education (HE) support for this twin approach. However, HE, particularly in the Global North, faces increasing scrutiny and critique over its implementation of the sustainability agenda. This has led to accusations of greenwashing, in which universities (willingly or perhaps erroneously) overmarket and/or underdeliver their sustainability policies, and climate hypocrisy, where an internationalist agenda frames student recruitment (the drive towards overseas markets), research activities and partnerships. For example, in UK tertiary education (further education and higher education), the largest sources of travel emissions are student flights, but there has been limited focus on the emissions stemming from learning and teaching, particularly fieldtrips, which this post is keen to reflect on.

    Destination long haul; Higher Education residential undergraduate student fieldtrips

    Outdoor education, particularly fieldtrips, offer a wide array of learner benefits and can be integral to different undergraduate programmes such as Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences (GEES), archaeology, history and classics. However, the competitive UK higher education market has helped generate an internationalisation of undergraduate fieldtrips which are now used as a critical marketing tool to attract prospective students, who as ‘consumers’, are increasingly keen on knowing where these trips go to inform applications. For example, a brief internet search of UK GEES departments shows undergraduate trips heading to exotic locations such as the Amazonia region, Colombia (BSc Environmental Science), Bahamas (BSc Ocean Science and Marine Conservation) and Malawi (BA Human Geography). 

    Climate hypocrisy is evident here; students are studying programmes that acknowledge and grapple with the climate crisis and the need for transformational structural changes, yet at the same time will be enrolled on degrees that facilitate long-haul international learning opportunities without significant acknowledgement or reflection of the environmental impacts. Whilst there is no reliable publicly available data on the level of carbon emissions generated by GEES and other subject fieldtrips in UK higher education, I can give an indication by drawing on a case study of the department I work in.

    Department of Environment and Geography, University of York

    The department runs a wide variety of one-day and residential fieldtrips across its undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. It is the undergraduate residential trips that, owing to their design, have particularly significant carbon emissions and were made the focus of the subsequent investigation. Until 2022-2023, the department ran several residential fieldtrips that encompassed both UK and overseas destinations for its four undergraduate programmes (BSc Environmental Science; BSc Physical Geography and Environment; BSc Environment, Economics and Ecology; BA Human Geography and Environment). 

    I used the University of York’s carbon calculator, which draws upon the UK government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs greenhouse conversion factors to calculate the carbon emissions stemming from travel and accommodation and the offsetting requirements. The table below shows the residential fieldtrips and carbon emissions from travel (including coach and flights where relevant) and accommodation on a per-person and 50-person basis. For four 50-person trips, this generated 108,521.85 kg CO2e (or 109 metric tonnes rounded up), equating to a carbon offsetting cost of £3,437.97 for the Department on an annual basis.

    Table 1: Department of Environment and Geography, University of York fieldtrips up to 2022-2023

    What does this total figure equate to? A good comparison is the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), an international non-profit that focuses on environment and development challenges and employs 170 staff working across several international regional centres. At the time of these fieldtrips operating, SEI’s 2020 annual report indicated that its air travel emissions were almost 550 metric tonnes CO2e (in 2019). So these department fieldtrips made up the equivalent of almost 20% of the total air travel emissions of a major international research organisation.

    Conclusion: a call to action

    These figures indicate the scale of the socio-environmental impacts caused and the urgent need for UK higher education learning and teaching operations, particularly in GEES given the subject areas, to be seen as ‘walking the talk.’ There have been recent efforts to address this issue through the work of the RGS-IBG who have developed a list of voluntary principles to guide geography fieldwork, including the adoption of ‘sustainable fieldtrips’ which acknowledge the need to recognise and justify the resulting carbon impacts. Whilst it is positive to see 31 institutions signed up, this is less than half of the UK GEES departments and does not incorporate any wider disciplinary commitments. 

    This article raises a call to action for all learned institutions and UK HE departments operating residential fieldtrips to adopt sustainable fieldtrip principles and operations. Without system-wide change, climate hypocrisy remains unchallenged in UK higher education learning and teaching. 

    To support academic staff and departments, several steps towards sustainable fieldtrips can be taken:

    • Conduct a carbon audit of fieldtrips to ascertain the impacts as undertaken at the Department of Environment of Environment and Geography, University of York; 
    • Using this data, consider revising long-haul fieldtrip locations to relevant localised destinations that can be reached through low carbon (i.e. no flights) transport; 
    • Publish the carbon costs on the department or university website to support wider debate and discussion of sustainable fieldtrips;
    • Implementing sustainable fieldtrips can lead to multiple Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) benefits, particularly around accessibility and inclusivity. Use this opportunity to review and seek to strengthen the EDI agenda. 
    • Disseminate best practice guidance through research and conference outputs;
    • Lobby learned institutions to adopt sustainable fieldtrip principles that align with those adopted by the RGS-IBG;

    Through these steps, UK higher education can begin to create a more holistic, robust and transparent sustainability and decarbonisation agenda. 

    However, these actions cannot happen in isolation or nullify wider critical discussions around the UK HE sustainability agenda. One of the most significant discussion points is the impact of international students studying in the UK, a country which is the second most popular study destination in the world. Whilst these students provide significant economic benefits to the UK economy (£41.9 billion between 2021/22) and are vital to the UK higher education business model (one in six universities get over a third of their total income from overseas students), the carbon footprint far surpasses the UK higher education fieldtrip contribution. A 2023 report from 21 UK further education and higher education providers concluded that student flights accounted for 2.2 metric tonnes of CO2e or 12% of total emissions, whilst globally, student mobility is estimated to generate at least 14 megatones of Co2e per year (14 million metric tonnes). It is clear therefore that in the UK context, there is an urgent need for a robust policy debate on UK higher education funding and student mobility, otherwise the sector’s decarbonisation agenda will remain only partially addressed through sustainable fieldtrips. 

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  • The hypocrisy of community-engaged research (opinion)

    The hypocrisy of community-engaged research (opinion)

    Any critique about the neoliberal university ought to confront and acknowledge its colonial roots. Victoria Reyes, in her book Academic Outsider (Stanford University Press, 2022), highlights that higher education was never designed for the global majority, particularly people of color from low-income backgrounds. It was built by and for the elite—predominantly white, cisgender, male and affluent individuals—whose privilege shaped the norms that dominate higher education today. These norms actively harm oppressed communities. People of color in positions of power within higher education, such as tenured faculty or administrators, often perpetuate these systems of oppression when they conform to institutional norms instead of challenging them.

    The positivist research paradigm (a.k.a. positivism) sustains oppression in academia by prioritizing quantifiable data while dismissing subjective experiences and social contexts in pursuit of “objective” truths. This fragmented approach erases the complexity of lived experiences and ignores the interplay of privilege and oppression in shaping identities. Positivism fuels deficit-based research, white saviorism and helicopter science, invalidating diverse epistemologies and methodologies. Deficit-based research highlights negative conditions in oppressed communities, framing them as lacking while ignoring systemic causes of inequities, such as settler colonialism and structural racism. Legacies of positivism reinforce harmful stereotypes and stigmatization toward communities of color in higher education.

    In contrast, a transformative paradigm offers an alternative to positivism by centering the voices and experiences of oppressed communities. It prioritizes knowledge democracy and dismantling of power imbalances that have historically excluded marginalized communities from the research process. Over the past 25 years, community-engaged research (CEnR) and community-based participatory research (CBPR) have emerged as crucial approaches in health education, public health and the social sciences to address social inequities. Both approaches emphasize equitable, reciprocal community-academic partnerships, to foster genuine collaboration and systemic change.

    As a woman of color from the Global South and an immigrant scientist who studies health equity, I have witnessed firsthand both the transformative potential of CEnR in addressing social injustice and the discriminatory practices that neoliberal universities perpetuate in my own research with low-income and immigrant communities of color. While CEnR and CBPR are integral to addressing complex health and social inequities by empowering communities and fostering sustainable interventions, a question remains: Can these approaches thrive within the neoliberal university?

    White Saviorism and the Neoliberal University

    Unfortunately, the rise of CEnR within neoliberal universities, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, was driven not by a genuine shift toward equity, but by a desire for funding and institutional prestige. As Megan Snider Bailey notes, “Market forces … shape university-community partnerships,” reinforcing a colonial mindset rooted in the white savior complex. This complex positions universities as gatekeepers of resources and legitimacy, exploiting oppressed communities under the appearance of “helping” them to secure funding from entities like the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

    The white savior complex describes privileged individuals, often white, who see themselves as “saviors” or “benevolent rescuers” of oppressed communities. This paternalistic mindset creates exploitative dynamics and replicates patterns of subjugation. For instance, universities often profit significantly from research with oppressed communities, taking up to 50 percent of grant funds as indirect costs for expenses such as facility maintenance and administration. These funds rarely return to the communities that need them most. Instead, universities divert these resources to maintain their own operations, exposing the hypocrisy of institutions that claim to support equity and justice. These exploitative practices raise a critical question: Who benefits the most from the oppression and illness of communities of color?

    The answer often points back to the universities themselves. They profit from the appearance of equity while perpetuating social injustice. The harm caused by white saviorism extends beyond finances. Transactional and extractive research methods are normalized in the neoliberal university. These methods reinforce patterns of subjugation and undermine long-term partnerships that could foster social justice and radical healing. As scholars have shown, a human-centered, liberatory approach must replace the transactional and extractive methods often associated with white supremacy and settler colonialism.

    Precarity in the Academy

    Universities that claim to promote social justice and CEnR often perpetuate exploitative practices and precarious working conditions. They frequently hire community leaders, promotoras de salud (community health workers), students and scholars of color on short-term contracts with little job security and no benefits. These precarious positions create dependency on higher institutions that exploit labor while controlling access to resources.

    As Anne Cafer and Meagen Rosenthal explain, moral outrage often drives short-term involvement in community projects. CEnR that fails to address inequitable power dynamics becomes another tool of oppression disguised as allyship. Superficial, performative community-academic partnerships deepen mistrust of academic institutions in oppressed communities and reinforce power dynamics and social injustice.

    Raquel Wright-Mair and Samuel Museus highlight how academia’s power hierarchies instill a fear of retaliation, silencing junior scholars of color from challenging systemic inequities. Scholars of color are often forced to align their work with institutional goals while sickening their bodies and damaging their mental health. The market-driven model of the neoliberal university prioritizes profits and productivity, limiting justice-oriented research. To address these issues in higher education, we must ask urgent questions:

    • What can we do to dismantle white-led initiatives that perpetuate dependence and subjugation?
    • How can institutions eliminate the white savior complex embedded in their structures?
    • How can we ensure fair calculation of indirect costs in CEnR that prevent the exploitation of community needs for grant funding and institutional prestige?

    Recommendations for Conducting Respectful and Liberatory CEnR

    The neoliberal university perpetuates the white savior complex, commodifies community needs and exploits people of color through short-term appointments designed to maintain systemic inequities. Therefore, it is pivotal to embrace the liberatory nature of CEnR that prioritizes social justice and structural change.

    • Transformative practices. Researchers must critically reflect on how their own positionality and privilege influence the liberation or oppression of marginalized communities. Universities must recognize and amplify the expertise of community members in shaping research agendas and outcomes. Furthermore, institutions must actively embrace linguistic justice and culturally relevant methods, respecting the languages, traditions and cultural contexts of the communities they engage. By prioritizing these practices, institutions can foster decolonial, respectful and inclusive collaborations that effectively challenge and dismantle oppressive systems in higher education.
    • Accountability is essential. Funding agencies must prioritize equitable representation and tangible benefits for communities over superficial metrics when evaluating CEnR. Neoliberal universities must stop exploiting community researchers and scholars of color through precarious, short-term appointments that reinforce tokenization and systemic inequities. Universities often hire people of color temporarily to build trust for community-academic partnerships while maintaining the overrepresentation of white faculty. To disrupt this cycle, funding agencies must require universities to intentionally hire and retain leaders, scholars and students from oppressed communities, ensuring they have job security. Empowering these voices permits CEnR to address community-specific needs, build local infrastructure and foster authentic partnerships rooted in equity, respect and shared power, dismantling the traditional hierarchies of academic research.
    • Rejecting unpaid labor is nonnegotiable. Unpaid labor perpetuates inequities, exploiting oppressed communities. Ethical CEnR demands equitable compensation, collaboration and empowerment, ensuring all participants are treated with dignity and are compensated fairly. These principles are critical to advancing liberation and driving systemic change.

    Advancing CEnR that truly serves oppressed communities requires dismantling the colonial, patriarchal and exploitative structures underpinning higher education. Embracing a transformative paradigm prioritizes genuine representation, community needs and liberation over market-driven motives, creating a model for lasting social change and liberation in an increasingly inequitable world.

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