Climate Change, Reason, and American Higher Education: Inculcating the Self-Deception of Capitalist Society

Abstract

Climate change is among the greatest sources of insecurity in the 21st century. The university is an important institutional curator of instrumental reason and, especially in applied research, is crucial to addressing related issues of insecurity across various domains. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, the neoliberal university, and the capitalist economy in which it is embedded, is antithetical to what is needed to foster the knowledge, values, dispositions, and relationships required for tackling the climate crisis in meaningful ways. This chapter begins by interrogating the Boyer Commission’s (2022) report on American higher education, sponsored by the US-based Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and its idea of world-readiness, which provokes students and educators to think differently by moving away from workforce skills and training to better understand the complexity of the world we live in. Interweaving examples from the American societal context with insights drawn from critical theory, this chapter discusses ways in which the American higher education system, mediated by the accumulation logic of capital, reproduces the economic growth imperative, diminishes the prospects for rational solutions to climate change, and exacerbates the uneven relationship between the technological mastery of nature and the mastery of human irrationality. This analysis furthermore examines how the transformation of education into a market-driven commodity not only reconfigures the institutional culture of the university but also cultivates modes of selfhood that are fundamentally misaligned with, and often detrimental to, the values and practices of ecological responsibility and care.