Faust, Stanford President Address Climate Change in Op-Ed

UPDATED: Sept. 25, 2014, at 12:06 a.m.

University President Drew G. Faust and her Stanford counterpart John L. Hennessy partnered to write a rare op-ed piece, published Tuesday by The Huffington Post, that emphasized the research role universities play in the fight to combat climate change.

Without directly addressing the question of divestment, Faust and Hennessy acknowledged the students on their campuses who have joined the global climate conversation and wrote that their schools’ contributions to combating climate change will come through education and research.

Students across the country, including those in Palo Alto and Cambridge, have called on institutions of higher education to divest their endowments from fossil fuel companies.

Faust has been adamant that divestment is not “warranted or wise,” writing in an open letter last year that “the endowment is a resource, not an instrument to impel social or political change.” Hennessy's Stanford, on the other hand, recently divested the university's endowment from approximately 100 companies engaged in coal extraction.

In the latest piece, Hennessy and Faust emphasized the role of academic research in combating climate change. “University scientists play crucial roles in investigating the origins and trajectory of climate change, in gauging its present and prospective consequences and in devising the new technologies that will accelerate the transition to renewable energy sources,” they wrote.

Faust and Hennessy added that universities need to accelerate their efforts in research and education. “We in higher education must continue to step up, as well,” they wrote.

The presidents then highlighted the work being done at their respective schools to adjust to and address climate change.

Mirroring Faust’s other public statements on divestment, the letter drew attention to a 21 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions on Harvard’s campus. The piece also mentioned a new partnership between Harvard, other local schools, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in developing the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center.

“Universities must ‘walk the walk,’ acting as pioneers in embracing the new technologies and policies that will be needed to sustain our ecosystem,” Hennessy and Faust wrote. “Universities must use these inherent strengths to make the most potent possible contribution on climate change.... Whether we rise to that challenge, with the urgency it demands, will largely determine what sort of world we leave for the generations to come.”

—Staff writer Matthew Q. Clarida can be reached at matthew.clarida@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @mattclarida.