Ask him about the coal

Apparently Richard C. Levin is going to testify before the Senate next week about global warming and climate change. The Yale Daily News article announcing this claims that sustainability has been a cornerstone of Levin's 15 year presidency of Yale and offers up a conference on climate change to take place at Yale next month featuring the governor of California, who previously came out in favor of global cooling as Mr. Freeze in the crapulescent Batman and Robin, as proof. Yale's office of public affairs is also touting this conference on sustainability at Yale next week, which seems like it was organized mostly by the Yale Sustainable Food Project and the recycyling office.

The Yale adminisrtration's efforts to claim and support sustainable projects (the food stuff, recycling) etc., may well be a good thing in the long run. Certainly, if you're an administrative technocrat it's better to be green than not. I suppose it's better to be a Richard Levin and talk about the importance of environmental sustainability, even if in deeply problematic and neoliberal ways, than to be a Larry Summers and "joke" about selling toxic waste to third world countries as a development strategy. But I would argue that labeling Yale as green or otherwise needs to involve a more careful analysis of how Yale functions not just on campus, but across its global reach.

Specifically, I'm thinking about Farallon, the hedge fund that's been so involved in the university endowment's unparalelled growth over the past decade. No small amount of the activism directed at the hedge fund by students, workers, and other activists between 2002 and the present (have) had to do with the ways university funds were/are being used to mismanage the environment - the forests Yale owned in Maine, those pesky water rights at the Baca ranch in southern Colorado, and that coal plant in Indonesia. None of those smack of sustainability. I commend activists who are fighting to make universities more sustainable and environmentally beneficial institutions, and think it's not a bad thing when universities support those efforts, but I also hope that someone on that senate panel asks Levin about the compromised nature of his claims to exemplarity.