New 'Young Pioneers'? Academic groups wary of UC San Diego's climate change grad requirement

The University of California San Diego does not require students to take courses in literature, foreign language, economics or U.S. government and history, receiving a "C" rating from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni for its general education requirements.

Students haven't been able to graduate for 10 years now without a diversity, equity and inclusion course, however, and next fall's incoming class will have another arguably ideological obligation to fulfill: climate change.

Executive Vice Chancellor Elizabeth Simmons, acting dean of Undergraduate Education Christine Alvarado and Academic Senate leaders announced the new requirement last month, named after the late oceanography professor Jane Teranes, who helped create a climate change studies minor in 2019.

They emphasized the new one-quarter requirement for undergraduates, which they will "explore" applying to transfers as well, "does not increase the number of courses required for graduation" because those satisfying the mandate "will overlap" with general education, DEI and major and minor requirements.

UCSD is one of the first colleges nationwide to compel students to study climate change, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. The only comparable mandate the publication could name was from Pennsylvania's private Dickinson College, which has required a "sustainability" course for five years.

Apart from mandates, Columbia University has a three-year-old school dedicated to solving "the climate crisis," and Stanford is launching a sustainability school next fall that is already embroiled in controversy for not ruling out fossil-fuel donations.

The right-leaning National Association of Scholars dubbed sustainability "Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism" in a 2015 report that traces it to nudge theory, later promoted by behavioral economist Felix Martin to overcome opposition to COVID-19 restrictions early in the pandemic.

"Climate change is the eugenics of our day" in that both are "ginned-up moral panics over imaginary crises" and not "particularly well-grounded in the actual science," Scott Turner, director of NAS's Diversity in the Sciences Project, told Just the News.

The Carnegie Foundation's funding for purported eugenics research pales in comparison to the funding for purported climate change research, he said, which "underscores the motivation for cash-strapped universities to jump on board the climate bandwagon."

The moral framing of UCSD's mandate, which is part of the UC System's Bending the Curve program to "empower One Million Climate Champions," has "shades of the Young Pioneers," the Soviet compulsory youth organization, according to Turner, retired faculty in the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science.

The Chronicle explicitly cites the ideological possibilities of UCSD's mandate, which could "soften the skepticism of doubters." It cites research that students, including self-identified conservatives, are more likely to believe in conventional climate-change narratives when they take such courses.

ACTA President Michael Poliakoff, whose group focuses on academic excellence, academic freedom and accountability, wasn't thrilled by how lower-tier schools might choose to copy the "pattern-making" Columbia.

The Ivy League school gets a "solid B" on ACTA's "What Will They Learn" ratings for meeting five of seven recommended curricular requirements, "with a strong grounding in the basics," Poliakoff wrote in an email, praising its "rigorous and highly regarded Great Books program."

But the former University of Colorado vice president of academic affairs said he worries that schools with weaker core curricula will "model themselves after Columbia" by adding a climate change mandate without fixing "other desperately problematic course deficits in history, geography, and Western Civ."

This failure is one reason why "many feel at ease publicly embracing a terrorist group committed to the destruction of our own nation," Poliakoff said, referring to support on campuses for the Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli civilians.

UCSD has released few details on the new requirement, which it apparently made public only a month after the Academic Senate's Representative Assembly approved it. 

But the Nov. 16 announcement suggests students will get one approved view of the contentious subject.

The requirement is "designed to empower our students with the knowledge and skills needed to confront the urgent global challenge of climate change" and "responds to the growing demand by undergraduates for climate-related courses and content," the officials said.

It was developed by the Senate Administration Workgroup on Climate Change Education for All, co-chaired by Teranes before her death last year at age 52 from an unspecified "brief illness."

A new Senate committee will oversee implementation, including "finalizing the criteria" for qualifying courses and "inviting instructors, programs, and departments to submit proposals to add courses" that qualify – a list that won't be shared until next fall.

The list of qualifying DEI-requirement courses gives a clue as to what might satisfy the climate requirement. It covers 25 fields including biology, archaeology, theater and music  – whose covered courses are hip-hop and "Blacktronica" — with the most courses offered in education and sociology.

NAS's Turner noted the workgroup report itself portrayed the new mandate as an improvement on the "burdensome box-checking exercise" of the DEI mandate, because the former will give students an "illuminative experience." Since it doesn't add to must-graduate credits, "the end result will be crowding out" similar experiences undergraduates might want, he said.

UCSD didn't answer queries on how the climate requirement isn't ideological and doesn't compel students to adopt one approved view and exclude others, such as that of contrarian environmentalist and former California gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger.

A 2020 review of his book "Apocalypse Never" in a Yale School of the Environment-affiliated publication deemed Shellenberger's argument that climate alarmism is bad for humanity "bad science ... based on a strawman argument." 

Scientist Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, claims that if Shellenberger's anti-growth Malthusian opponents "are wrong, all they would have done is made the world a better place," whereas "apocalyptic outcomes are indeed a real possibility" in "Cornucopian" visions like Shellenberger's.