Sustainability: Higher Education's New Fundamentalism

“Sustainability” is a key idea on college campuses in the United States and the rest of the Western world. To many, sustainability is just a new name for environmentalism. But the word has come to mean something much larger: an ideology that demands new limits on economic, political, and intellectual freedom as the price that must be paid to ensure the welfare of future generations.

This report is the first in-depth critical examination of the sustainability movement in higher education. The movement, of course, extends well beyond the college campus. But the college campus is where the movement gets its voice of authority, and where it molds the views and commands the attention of young people.

Hank Campbell , president, American Council on Science and Health Sustainability has become a catch-all term for people and companies trying to attach an ethical halo to their self-identification. The National Academy of Scholars has punctured this mythology and shows how, rather than defending the environment, the sustainability movement primarily results in higher costs—costs that will be borne by those least likely to be able to afford it, but who are duped into thinking they are making a difference.

Willie Soon, astrophysicist, Cambridge, MA

Sustainability is a must-read for all truth-seeking and freedom-loving students. If our higher educational institutions are now so willingly corrupted with anti-scientific and pseudo-religious agendas of "cosmic" justices, I can only wish for more determined courage for all to stand up and say "no more." This NAS report will help provide the necessary intellectual ammunition to do so.

David Legates, Professor of Climatology, University of Delaware

"The sustainability movement is adversely changing academia through the degradation of intellectual freedom, the corrosion of institutional integrity, and the transition from a “diversity” of thought into a “university” of singular beliefs.

Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism shines a light on the impact the environmental movement has had on higher education. It is an eye- opener and definitely worth the read."