Universities and Climate Action, featuring Professor Tristan McCowan

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD (INTRO)

Hello and welcome to Series 3 of The Greatest Good, a UCL Press Podcast. I’m your host, Professor Philip Schofield, and Director of the Bentham Project here at UCL. 

Jeremy Bentham, and 18^th– and 19^th-century philosopher, was the intellectual inspiration for the founding of University College London.

In this series, we focus on the intersection of Bentham’s ideas with current thinking on climate justice, in conversation with leading UCL academics.

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN (INTRO)

The climate crisis is in human beings. It’s in the way we see ourselves and relate to the world. It’s in our political structures, our economic structures, and the industrial model that came out of the Industrial Revolution. 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

My name is Tristan McCowan. I’m Professor of International Education at the Institute of Education at University College London. And my work really focuses on understanding the relationship between universities and society, thinking about each, how each influences the other. Questions like, I mean, if we think about a university like UCL or any other university, we’re usually thinking of some kind of mission to have a positive impact on students or on the society in which they’re located or global impact in the case of UCL. 

So, my work is mainly about how to understand what that impact is, how universities influence society, what the limitations of that influence might be, and in what direction they go. And they are surprisingly complex questions and quite hard to research. And some of my work is theoretical, trying to model that, trying to understand how we might conceptualize that relationship. But also, I’m involved in different kinds of empirical projects around the world. I work a lot in Latin America, but also other regions, Africa and Asia and the Pacific. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Can you give us a sense of what you were doing in those regions?

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

Absolutely. So, I’ll give an example of a recent project that we’ve run called Climate U. The full name was Transforming Universities for a Changing Climate. And, as part of that project, we brought together 16 different institutions around the world, and in those different continents. We had partners in Brazil, Kenya, Tanzania, India, Indonesia, and Fiji, as well as UCL, and the idea was to understand what universities can do to positively impact climate mitigation and adaptation. So, both reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also supporting communities to adapt to the difficult conditions that are already in place due to climate impacts. And – 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Sorry, what were the main conclusions that came from that?

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

Well, we tried to work with a participatory action research model. So that’s trying to do research in a different way from the conventional one.  Instead of researchers going into a community and extracting information of different types and going off and then publishing it and sharing it within the academic sphere, to work with community members as researchers, as subjects rather than objects of the research, partly as a matter of respect, but also because when we talk about climate, communities need to be agents in this process because they know their local area better than anyone else. And they’re also gonna have to be leading some of the changes that are needed. So, the research was about trying to understand how to support those processes better, how to work with communities to bring those difficult changes. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Can you give us an example of how that worked?

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

Absolutely, yeah. So our partner in Tanzania worked with a coastal community that had been threatened by, well, that are still threatened by coral loss and loss of mangroves, which is problematic for them, not only in the broader ecological sense of the threats to the planet, but also in a more immediate sense because they rely on the fish stocks that are supported by coral reefs and the crabs that are supported by mangroves. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Is it the increasing temperature of the water that’s causing the problem?

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

There are various causes, but the coral loss through the temperature increase, but mangroves are also just cut down. So, our partners from the University of Dar es Salaam worked together with a community organisation that had started some quite innovative work on coral restoration, to try and work with them to systematise that knowledge and to support those processes and to spread it with other communities.  Now I hasten to add, I’m not a technical expert in this, I’m not an ecologist, I’m not an environmental scientist. 

So, what we were interested in was looking at the learning processes that take place, the sharing of knowledge that takes place between university researchers and communities, and how we can move to something that we might call co-production, so that universities can work together with communities where both are agents in the process. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean, that strikes a chord with me, because we’ve been running a crowdsourcing project at the Bentham Project and instead of sort of public engagement, the original idea was: how do you get your message out to the public? Rather, what we did was involve the public in our research by getting them to transcribe Bentham manuscripts which had never been transcribed before. And members of the public have transcribed, and are continuing to transcribe, over, you know, 40,000 sheets, which is a fantastic resource for us. So you know, from my perspective that sort of cooperation really, really works very well. And your whole sort of enterprise is sort of multidisciplinary, isn’t it, because like you’re saying, you’re looking at the interaction between the scientific experts and the local communities, presumably to make that model more widely applicable?

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

Absolutely. And I think it’s important to acknowledge, it is very challenging in the sphere. I mean, it’s easy to say co-production or co-creation, but to really do it, there are a lot of barriers. I mean, one of them is a condescending attitude on the part of university researchers. You know, sometimes they feel, you know, they’ve achieved a status in society and knowledge and that they are on a different level. So that can be a barrier.  But we have also encountered barriers from communities because communities sometimes have more of a transaction relationship with external agencies. And they’re thinking about what they can gain in a material sense, rather than the kind of knowledge exchange we’re looking for. So there are some real challenges, which we were working through in that project. Another is an instrumentalization of local knowledge. So, one of the things we were trying to work with, and is seen to be a very important thing in climate action, is indigenous knowledge. How can we tap into different knowledge traditions that aren’t represented in mainstream universities or academia or schools, sources of understanding of the world, which are within different cultures and languages and communities? And there has been some attention to this in different areas, in areas of health and agriculture and weather systems, but it tends to be in quite an instrumental way, where you’re almost plucking a piece of factual knowledge from a community and using that, you know, the most obvious example being medicinal plants, for example, and then you’re using it for other ends. And the real challenge is to engage with indigenous knowledge in a more holistic way, to understand it as a system of understanding in its own right that needs to be entered into and work with respectfully in the spirit of mutual exchange. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

And there’s a point there, that the people who have to, in the end, do whatever needs to be done are those local people, and therefore they’ve got to be comfortable or see the sense of what’s being perhaps recommended, or thinking it through themselves, what they need to do.

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

Absolutely. I mean, there are some, you know, some people hold faith in a technological breakthrough that’s going to save us all. And then you get various, you know, competitions, Richard Branson and then Bill Gates has also tried to promote, you know, a single technological breakthrough that can then be brought to market and save all of us or perhaps a scientific discovery. I mean, I don’t want to reject that idea completely because I think that some technological breakthroughs will be necessary and useful, but it’s never going to be the whole solution.  The complexity of the climate crisis and other environmental crises and social crises that are all interlocking are such that you need all communities on board for this and working in their unique local areas to bring the changes that are needed. So that can be in dialogue with a university like UCL that has a breakthrough, but it’s never going to be UCL doing it for communities all around the world. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Right… Is this something that UCL is doing well? 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

I would say UCL is certainly a university that has a huge amount of expertise on various aspects of climate, both in terms of what you might think of as conventional climate science in natural sciences, geology and so forth, but also in other aspects of scholarship around climate. 

And I think it’s really important to point out: addressing the climate crisis is also about social sciences, arts and humanities. It’s not just about natural sciences, STEM subjects, because the climate crisis is one that’s in human beings.  It’s in the way we see ourselves and relate to the world. It’s in our political structures, our economic structures and the industrial model that came out of the Industrial Revolution and that caused the buildup of greenhouse gases. 

So, UCL is a university that has strengths across all of those areas, and many researchers are either directly or indirectly contributing to that. But that doesn’t mean that UCL necessarily has all the answers. It has a global outlook. It’s an extremely internationalised university, very high numbers of international students, which is also a great thing for that reach and engagement. But it still needs to work in a spirit of humility with partners all around the world, because no university can solve those problems on its own. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean, I had two questions, one was about the origins of UCL in a sort of a radical tradition and you were talking about the role of universities, whether that has some long-standing impact on the way in which the university sees itself, I’m not sure about it. You think of Oxford and Cambridge, the way sort of they might have been founded and used for centuries by the sort of upper echelons of society and then the University of London, as it was, comes along as a radical challenge to what Bentham called ‘the two grand public nuisances’ of Oxford and Cambridge.  

The other point, perhaps most significant, is, you know, Bentham says look to interests and from that point of view what we need is to place academics in a situation in which it’s their interest to tell the truth and I’m thinking here about the whole sort of debate on climate and the climate deniers. You know, from Bentham’s point of view in a university like UCL, at least the academics here, should be in a sense rewarded for saying what they think is true. Does that make any sense in this context?

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

I think we have, in some ways, some contradictory incentives for academics. I’m certainly not a doom-and-gloom person in terms of our higher education systems. I still believe strongly that universities represent one of the richest and most fruitful areas, spheres of society for generating the kind of transformation we need. Universities still have a vigorous spirit of inquiry and deliberation and all of the things that we need if we’re going to move towards solution.  

But there are some constraints on that, and I think the international ranking system of universities and all of the backwash effect that that has on national evaluation systems of different types – and this is global phenomenon, and it’s certainly not limited to the UK – can prioritise certain types of academic impact that may have a positive impact on solving our social and ecological crisis but not necessarily. And excessive focus on elite journals and high-profile research studies unfortunately devalues all of the other academic work and teaching, research and community engagement that are also needed. Not to mention difficulties of funding, which are a whole other debate, and that also make life very hard for researchers, particularly in the global south. 

So, there are a lot of constraints. I still have… Faith sounds rather too distant. There’s a reality of positive impact to the universities, but it is under conditions that make it very hard for academics. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

That’s sort of…very sobering…And the point you make, I believe, is that more about the climate change could be put into the university curriculum?

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN 

Absolutely. So perhaps surprisingly, I don’t take an approach necessarily of teaching climate more. We are actually in the process of developing new modules, hopefully ones which people across any discipline can take. And those are very valuable initiatives.  But that’s not got the whole of the story. 

The approach I take personally, and this was covered in the recently published book, is one that I call a curriculum topography, so that we think about a university or any space in society is a learning environment that has many different elements. And what we need to do is to provide as rich a possible of an environment for learning for students, which includes what we might think of as the classroom, formal spaces of learning, so modules and not only modules on climate specifically, but also integrating those ideas and sustainability more broadly into every discipline area, every course. There are some initiatives on the way in that regard. 

But also thinking about other spaces of learning on campus, a lot of the most meaningful learning takes place in spaces that aren’t planned in universities and societies, in cafes when people are talking, those spaces are very important. And if we reflect back on our own experiences at universities, some of the most transformative spaces are in those.  

And that’s part of what creates a university. If you’re lucky enough to be in a campus university, great. Otherwise, there are some other spaces online which can do that. 

And then the third area, so we’ve got class from campus, the third C is community. So, learning that takes place beyond the gates of the universities, hopefully in conjunction with learning that takes place in universities through different kinds of work placement or internship or volunteering or other kind of experience, but integrated with those and in ways that have a different nature because it’s experiential learning.  It’s learning through real experiences of working with different communities and environmental work and so forth. 

And if we can combine those different kinds of experience, it can provide the best possible experience for learning, particularly because students have a whole range of different levels of understanding this material. And many students are extremely knowledgeable and experienced in this area. It’s very often more so than their lecturers. So, it’s important not to assume that students are coming in with a blank slate and to draw on that experience and to support students at all different levels in developing that work themselves. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

And, I mean, it’s a point here that everyone can do something. I’m sort of reminded of a comment by Bentham’s contemporary Edmund Burke, who Bentham didn’t particularly admire, but there’s a quotation attributed to Burke – I don’t think Burke ever actually quite said this, but it’s that ‘there’s no greater fool than he who does nothing because he can only do a little’. 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

Yeah, I’m a very strong believer in the importance of grassroots initiatives that might be very small in scale. And I think it’s really important that we value those small-scale initiatives that exist in the work of a particular lecture in a classroom or a project with a particular community or a small-scale student led initiative, partly because if we have a flowering of many of those different initiatives, of course, together, they provide a big impact.

But, also, it provides the kind of experimentation that we really need to be able to address this from all of the different angles that are necessary. And that it taps into the creativity and contextualized understanding that all of those different actors have.

And particularly because when we think about the impact of universities, it’s not only about reach, it’s also about intensity. A single student might find themselves transformed by their university experience in a way that goes on to influence them throughout their life. It may be one person, but it might be still a very significant impact.

Of course, we can’t abandon altogether some of the large-scale initiatives that we have, even the much-maligned climate agreements and COPs, the conferences of parties. It’s all part of the puzzle – but that needs to be seen hand-in-hand with some of these small-scale initiatives that are vital.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

And, I mean, coming onto the politics of climate change. There are people who deny this such thing as climate change, despite all the evidence – and what should universities’ role be in relation to that debate? 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

That’s a very important question, and there are people who don’t believe in the existence of climate change. It is a small minority of people globally, but particularly prevalent in the US and some other countries in Brazil under Bolsonaro, and this has been actively promoted by the fossil fuel lobby.  Moving now, to a large extent, from outright denial to a more subtle position of delay, so accepting the general thesis of anthropogenic global warming, but casting doubt on certain elements to delay any action that might lead to a lessening of profits. And there’s a very active social media and internet presence, as well as books that have been written on the subject. 

And while I was writing Universities and Climate Action, the book I’ve just published, I had to read a number of these books, which was quite an interesting experience. And there were times where I felt a little bit like one of those FBI agents, in a Michigan militia undercover, immersing myself in some of this material to try and understand it. And it was an unsettling experience, but very interesting. And certainly, there are some parts of the argument that are quite seductive when you’re inside it, when you are immersed in it, particularly when you are surrounding yourself with a community that is reinforcing these ideas, but connecting them up to many others as well.  

However, if you analyze that position, it is incoherent, mainly because there is no real answer to the question of why such a giant conspiracy would have been set up in the first place. It’s not quite clear why people would have created this enormous hoax of climate change if it didn’t exist. 

The main reason given is this idea of the watermelon, that environmentalists are green on the outside and red on the inside, that it’s communism via the back door or some kind of smuggling in of global government to restrict people’s freedom. So that’s the main argument given, along with self-interest on the part of economics and so forth.  

But it’s quite a weak argument. Anyway, this process of trying to understand climate denial, I think, is very important.  

So, returning to the question of what a university should do, it’s certainly tempting to shut it down. And it’s tempting because concerted climate action is very hard to achieve in society. People try and resist it because it’s unfamiliar, it takes effort. 

It’s not always a sacrifice. It might lead us to a society that we would prefer anyway. But it’s certainly a difficult shift for people individually and collectively. And uncertainty is an excuse for inaction. 

And so, I can certainly see the temptation for trying to shut down climate denial altogether.  But I don’t think a university can do that. I think pedagogically we can’t do that. I think in a classroom we have to air different views. Of course, there are always limits to freedom of expression. But I think as far as we can, we need to air different views, even ones which might be seen to be factually false.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I suppose you have to instill a view that you have to respect the evidence and then you can debate it. 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s part of the learning process. 

And, you know, the scientific method feeds off that scepticism. And it’s important to maintain awareness of the fact that, even though the existence of human made climate change is not in doubt, there are many aspects of the question that still need investigation.  We still need to solve, not least of which: What on earth do we do now, in order to get to a place where we’re actually addressing the problem? 

So, there are a lot of questions that still need that skepticism, those open minds, and to try and try and work together to discover those ways forward. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I mean, the way you described it, it’s like the interests behind climate denial seemed a bit like the tobacco companies when they were denying that smoking caused cancer.

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

Absolutely! In fact, there’s a very good book and documentary, called Merchants of Doubt, that traces exactly that lineage from the lobbying around the damaging effects of tobacco through various other environmental scandals and to the climate crisis, the same techniques are being used. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Right, and like the betting industry with its ‘bet responsibly’, as though it’s not really a problem if you’re responsible. 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

And one of the techniques used instead of outright denial is a shift of responsibility from companies and governments to individuals. So, a large part of the recycling drive actually came from the fossil fuel lobby trying to pass responsibility onto consumers; that, you know, the environmental problems are your fault for not recycling your cartons.  It’s nothing to do with the company or state policy. Of course, recycling is a good thing to do, but it’s never going to be the whole of the solution, and it shouldn’t deflect attention from the kinds of collective solution that we can bring. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

And have you got any examples of what we, let’s say the UCL community might do? I mean, I find lights left on.  We have rooms in Bentham House, which are air-conditioned and windows open. And I’m sort of forever shutting doors in one of our particular air-conditioned rooms, which people open. Yet, there’s a lot of attempts being made to educate our staff here about waste. And I despair sometimes. 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

Absolutely – and even air conditioning and heating battling against each other at the same time.  Yeah, it’s very frustrating. 

It also it sends a really negative message and it creates cynicism and that’s really dangerous because climate action is so fragile and, you know, there’s a psychological element there. You know, bringing change is difficult and cynicism often provides us with an excuse for not bringing change, so I think we have to be really careful about that because of the messages it sends out – as well as, of course, the actual direct carbon emissions and other environmental impacts that universities will have. 

And I think maybe looking at that in a more positive sense, we can think about a hidden curriculum of an institutions that might bring positive change. There’s been a, you know, sociology of education for the last 50 or so years has paid quite a lot of attention to the hidden curriculum but almost always in a negative sense of the way that capitalist societies reproduce themselves through formal education systems, creating malleable, conformists but also competitive, workers who are then compliant in an unequal capitalist system. But you could also see this idea in a more positive sense; that maybe we can create environments that that actually can model and inspire and perhaps pre-figure a regenerated community and society and ecosystem in ways that will actually encourage people to live well. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean in a sense getting the university to be that microcosm, the way we treat each other, the way we respect each other, say well this is a model, you’ll learn these values and put them into operation when you get into the real world, because the people we teach here are going to, some of them, a lot of them are going to have very significant roles in the future. 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that modeling is vital with students, but also between staff members. I mean, we are a community. It is a transient community. It’s a little bit different from a geographical community, but universities are nevertheless communities. They have their own dynamics and people learn from one another. And that needs to be taken into account.  

Some universities are extremely large. UCL is a large university in the UK context, but some, even setting aside the giant online universities in South Asia, some of the universities in Latin America are two or three hundred thousand in-person students. So, they’re real cities themselves. And the Latin American tradition has a very strong social commitment in public universities. They had a reform in 1918, which diffused through the whole region, which brought a real reorientation of universities towards the public good, to a commitment to society, to democratic governance. So that also led to all university leaders being internally elected, which has its ups and downs. But it certainly leads to a strong responsiveness of university leaders to the university community and a much stronger emphasis on community engagement that exists in most regions as well. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I suppose one way of looking at it is not that, in a sense, yes, universities could do more, we could all do more, but at least universities are doing quite a bit, you know, if it wasn’t for universities, we’d be in a much bigger mess, arguably. 

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

Absolutely. I mean, I think we need to strike a balance between, you know, the need for change in universities and that there is a need for change. And there are some things, you know, we have our fairly entrenched disciplinary divides that can be an impediment. Universities are also exclusive in ways that they shouldn’t be.  They don’t always communicate with societies in ways that they should. 

But having said that, I entirely agree. I think we need to value the institution that has successfully adapted over many, many centuries, and also is, you know, in a world that has so many contrary dynamics, a sector which still provides a lot of hope for solutions that we can find, particularly in the context of such a complex issue. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Thank you so much Tristan for that, it’s been really enlightening.

PROFESSOR TRISTAN MCCOWAN

Thanks, it’s been a pleasure. 

Universities and Climate Action by Tristan McCowan