An faculty-student team from UC San Diego is leading the nation with a genuine climate GE rolling out in a couple of weeks, a fossil-fuel-funding transparency resolution approved by the faculty senate, and the founding of a system-wide group of activists holding UC leadership to climate account! It’s an outstanding example of anthropologist Margaret Mead’s famous axiom, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Far more easily, a small group of committed faculty and staff can change a university, and UCSD has set out a blueprint of sorts. There’s no reason we can’t do something similar, and relatively fast!

In their abstract, the UC San Diego authors Monica Nelson, Cathy Gere, Adam Cooper, Varykina G. Thackray and Adam R. Aron write:

As the climate and ecological predicament worsens, too many people seem to be waiting for policy to be implemented from “on high” by institutional leaders and politicians. Yet the history of many social struggles shows us that achieving policy wins requires a strong push from below. Here, we recount how a small band of the committed – members of the climate justice organization, the UC San Diego Green New Deal – were critical to reorienting the climate policy of a very large institution, the 10 campus University of California, as well as winning important climate actions at UC San Diego itself.

We discuss three campaigns: Decarbonization and Electrification, Cutting Ties with Fossil Finance, and Climate Education for All. From shifting the focus to emission reductions rather than carbon offsets, to pushing Chase Bank out of the campus student center, to providing new undergraduate curricula, these wins are now reverberating throughout higher education in the United States and beyond. This movement has also provided an important pedagogical role by teaching organizing and activist skills to undergraduates so they can go forth and fight for their futures.