Peter Wood appeared on WSJ Live with Mary Kissel, talking about the latest NAS report, Sustainability: Higher Education's New Fundamentalism. Wood explained that students taken in by the sustainability movement are trading rigorous education for shallow activism:
They’re missing out on getting a good education. In place they’re getting a fad, they’re getting intellectual indoctrination, a very narrow slice of the future, and they’re probably building much of what they believe on the tissue of illusions.
He also commented on the movement's rise among youth:
The results are that there are many, many college students in the country who now believe that this is the movement of their times and their lives, and that this commitment should override everything else they’re doing.
Kissel asked Peter which colleges and universities were especially egregious in prioritizing sustainability. He mentioned Cornell University, Yale University, and Middlebury College, three of the institutions profiled in the NAS report. The report also profiles Swarthmore College and Harvard University, in addition to mentioning dozens more.
Kimberley Strassel wrote an accompanying op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about "congressional climate crusaders" mimicking the tactics of campus activists. She wrote that there is a "growing campaign by politicians, unions and environmentalists to intimidate into silence any academic or program that might challenge liberal ideology."
