Harvard Launching New Green Major Led by Divestment Activist
'The fix is in!' warns environmental economist, describing it as 'slanted'; also, 'Hamas minders … must be smiling' at new Harvard award
Harvard University, under pressure from the Trump administration to reduce the power held by faculty “more committed to activism than scholarship,” is poised to approve a new major in “Energy, Climate, and Environment.” The major is spearheaded by a professor who co-chaired an activist group that pushed Harvard to divest from fossil fuels and demanded that the university “Provide funds and staff for faculty engaging in advocacy on climate change in Massachusetts and at the national/international level.”
The proposed major is already being mocked by Matthew Kahn, who is provost professor of economics at the University of Southern California and a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. In a post on Substack, Kahn called the major ideologically “slanted.”
“It looks to me like the fix is in!” he wrote, faulting Harvard for failing to cover free-market environmentalism. He advised, “Parents should have questions about what actual skills does this major emphasize and what job trajectories does it open up?”
Kahn also expressed concern that the science and math in the major would be at high school rather than college level.
Harvard’s vice provost for climate and sustainability, James Stock, who served as a member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2013-2014, insisted to the Washington Free Beacon in a phone interview that Harvard has “a commitment to making this rigorous.” Said Stock, who has been involved in planning for the major, “there’s going to be a statistics requirement.”
Kahn is skeptical. “There is so much subject matter to cover and the faculty in Physics, atmospheric sciences, chemistry just assume that the students don’t know the core math and basic science here so they teach as if the students are 13 years old. I saw this at UCLA. The lowest common denominator problem emerges in these interdisciplinary programs. This creates both a negative selection effect and ultimately a weak treatment effect,” he wrote, using social science lingo to suggest that the weakest students choose such majors and that the students don’t learn much.
Who does benefit? The grown-ups involved (with the exception of the tuition-paying parents and the future graduates), Kahn suggests: “The Deans can proudly tell the Provost that they have created a popular new major and thus they deserve to be promoted to Provost. The Provost can tell Presidential Search Committees that they have innovated and that the problems of the 21st Century are truly interdisciplinary but what about our consumers? When these majors are 40, will they regret their choice? Will Harvard offer a refund?”
Harvard calls the major a “concentration,” because why use a two-syllable widely understood word when you can use a four-syllable word that is more opaque to the non-Harvard world?
A Feb. 11 article in the Harvard Crimson said Harvard’s plan has passed the “educational policy committee” and is set to be presented Feb. 18 before the Faculty Council of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, another step in Harvard’s extensive academic bureaucracy. The Crimson named three faculty members involved. One is Joyce Chaplin. Chaplin, a history professor, wrote an October 2024 op-ed identifying herself as “co-chair of Harvard Faculty Divest.” In the op-ed, she linked to a paper she and Harvard Divest colleagues wrote in 2019 describing “the climate crisis as a burgeoning social and moral catastrophe larger than any in history.” It recommended responses including, “Make vegetarian meals the default choice in dining halls, the Faculty Club, and Crimson Catering.” It also called for “rejecting donations from the fossil fuel industry” and for providing funding and staffing “for faculty engaging in advocacy on climate change.” Focusing on teaching alone, the paper argued, “inculcates the wrong values, merely helping to produce the next generation of apologists for the status quo.”
Chaplin also is listed as a signer of a 2021 “statement by Harvard faculty in support of Palestinian liberation.” That statement claimed “Unwavering US financial, military, and political support has fueled an apartheid system that institutionalizes the domination and repression of Palestinians.” It said, “We demand an end to US support for Israel’s apartheid regime, condemn Israeli state aggression, and affirm our support for the Palestinian liberation struggle.” There’s substantial overlap between climate-change activism and anti-Israel activism. At Dartmouth, student Roan V. Wade was both a Sunrise Movement “hub coordinator“ and active with the Palestine Solidarity Coalition. Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard rebranded as Sunrise Harvard.
Chaplin and a second faculty member involved in the new major, a professor of sociology, Jason Beckfield, also wrote a 2017 opinion piece faulting Harvard for retracting an admissions offer to a history graduate program to a student who spent 20 years in prison for murdering her four-year-old child.
“Joyce is very thoughtful,” Stock said, calling Chaplin “a dedicated member of this community.” He said that designing the new major would involve “balancing lots of different people’s views.”
Beckfield gave a 2019 interview in which he said he was scared to see European countries introducing market-based forces in health care. “If there is anything we know about population health in the US, as it relates to the organization of the health system, it is that market logic for the health system does not work,” he said. “And it is really frightening to me as an American to see so many European welfare states trying out market tools and applying them to the health system.”
Harvard already has majors in Environmental Science and Public Policy, in Environmental Science and Engineering, and in Earth and Planetary Sciences. Stock, the Harvard assistant provost, said “we don’t really want to have duplication” and that Harvard was “in the process of trying to make it non-duplicative.” Asked if that means Harvard is planning to kill one of the existing three other environmental majors, he said he didn’t want to get ahead of himself.
Stock said some of the work behind the scenes on the concentration might not have been apparent in the Crimson article or visible to Kahn. “There’s a lot of excitement about this,” he said.
Stock is quoted in a Harvard Business School case study as warning sensibly, at a Dec. 3, 2019, faculty meeting, against divesting the Harvard endowment from fossil fuels: “My worry is that the message, intended or not, is one of moral superiority. We would send that message not just to the oil executives … but to the oil roughneck in west Texas, the refinery worker in Louisiana, the long-haul trucker, and the coal miner in Gillette, Wyoming. Those workers are not morally flawed by virtue of their working in the fossil-fuel industry. But how could they interpret Harvard’s divestment as other than yet another criticism by liberal elites of the honest way of life they adopted to earn a living and support their families?” Harvard went ahead anyway and announced a divestment in September 2021.
The decision to advance yet a fourth environment-related major comes as Harvard also ramps up anti-Israel and anti-Trump public activism on other fronts as well.
The Nieman Foundation, a Harvard fellowship program for mid-career journalists that is part of Harvard’s central administration, announced it had awarded the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism to two Palestinian journalists in Gaza. (I started to type that Louis Lyons would be rolling in his grave, but it turns out that Lyons was a reflexive defender of Harvard against the critics of his day, and wrong about important facts. A 1949 piece by Lyons in the Atlantic defended Harvard against a Chicago Tribune series reporting “In textbooks, student activities and the writings and speeches of some instructors, THE TRIBUNE found proof that the Ivy League is infested with the pedagogic termites of communism, socialism, world federalism, Anglo-American federalism and other foreign-born schemes which would weaken or destroy the American republic.” The same Lyons piece in the Atlantic defended Alger Hiss, who turned out, in the end, to have been a Communist, against what Lyons called a “smear.”)
One of the Harvard-honored “journalists,” Shrouq Aila, is the daughter-in-law of the Hamas-appointed mayor of Gaza City, Yahya Sarraj.
The other Harvard-honored Palestinian “journalist” is Anas Baba of NPR. The Segal executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Robert Satloff, called the award “another sad comment on the state of journalistic coverage of the Gaza war and the refusal of America’s media establishment to come to grips with that reality.” Baba, Satloff said, “has a blind-spot when it comes to Hamas, which one would imagine should be the Big Story in Gaza but has almost never been a topic of his reporting.”
“He has no problem chronicling the human cost of Israeli military action but he almost never even mentions Hamas, let alone report on its military, economic, political, social stranglehold on Palestinians in Gaza or its abject indifference to Palestinian civilians during the war,” Satloff wrote. “If this reporting merits a prize for ‘conscience and integrity,’ the Hamas minders who, one can assume, eagerly try to control what reporters file from inside Gaza must be smiling.”
Harvard’s Nieman Foundation has a track record of falsely accusing Israel of killing Palestinian “journalists” without mentioning that some of the “news workers” that advocacy groups count as casualties in Gaza were actually Hamas terrorists operating under journalistic cover in a way that endangers legitimate journalists.
In a separate development, Stephen M. Walt, a Harvard professor whose 2007 book with John Mearsheimer on the Israel Lobby was widely discredited, is out with a new piece in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, which is the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. Walt accuses the Trump administration of “predatory hegemony” like that of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or a Mafia boss.
“The desire to extract wealth from colonial possessions was a central ingredient in the Belgian, British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial empires, and similar motives influenced Nazi Germany’s one-sided economic relations with its trading partners in central and eastern Europe and the Soviet Union’s relations with its Warsaw Pact allies. Although these cases differ in important ways, in each one a dominant power sought to exploit its weaker partners to secure asymmetric benefits for itself, even if its efforts did not always succeed and if some clients cost more to acquire and defend than they provided in wealth or tribute,” Walt writes. “Like a Mafia boss or an imperial potentate, Trump expects foreign leaders seeking his favor to engage in demeaning shows of deference and grotesque forms of flattery, much as members of his cabinet do.”
Perhaps Harvard professors Walt and Chaplin can debate amongst themselves whether Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, climate change, or the Trump administration is the greater “social and moral catastrophe.” The “journalists” from Gaza might be imported to Cambridge to cover the controversy, if they can obtain visas. It might not be worth the price of Harvard tuition, and certainly doesn’t deserve any taxpayer subsidies, but it at least might be mildly entertaining. They could have it at the Faculty Club if enough vegetarian food is made available.
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Good article, but, the fact that "There’s substantial overlap between climate-change activism and anti-Israel activism" (i.e., Hamas-supporters) tells the reader all that they need to know about these movements, and, probably about the mental state of most Harvard faculty and administrators and staff: mental illness is widespread. An inability to tell the difference between correct and incorrect (science), and between right and wrong, and between good and evil is a good working definition of mental illness.
Palestinianism is the product of Left academia and has become its most important and sacred moral crusade, expecting them to abandon it is like expecting the Pope to renounce Catholicism or a parent to abandon their child. And this is even more pronounced at Harvard, one of the leaders of the campaign to destroy the Jewish state, and home of America's once and future Progressive aristocracy, where entry to the elite means you worship all the proper Social Justice sacred victims (and hysterical causes) or lose access to the top of the social pyramid.
Harvard admins and professors will lie and issue fake statements and form fake committees and make hysterical appeals to academic freedom (that they would never extend to opponents), blame everything on the evil Zionists, they may even sacrifice an ally or two to protect the larger cause, but they will never abandon Palestinianism, as it provides both political and spiritual thrills and allows the campus crusader to imagine themselves as revolutionaries allied to of a nation of holy martyrs who must be liberated in the name of Justice, by any means necessary. (The Left professoriate needs to feel radical like the rest of us need oxygen.)
Progressivism is at root an ideological expression of white guilt and white saviorism as well as a peacock display by our elite overclass—they are so smart, rich, and well-connected that they can afford to worship and adore even deranged Jew haters who are always plotting and/or applauding a massacre. Rubes and bigots love their own people and home, but sophisticated cosmopolitan globalists are so exalted that they love the Wretched of the Earth, no matter how bloodthirsty.
How naive and gullible do you have to be to believe that Harvard would ever abandon the sacred cause of Palestinianism?!! The cause is entirely symbolic at this point and has nothing to do with the actual Palestianian people (the cause actually grows stronger the more the people are immiserated), they are simply a credential and status marker, props and extras in the white savior's public pageants of performative compassion, with their flag the newest must-have accessory for our Progressive elite. They are too rich a symbol to ever abandon, a sort of secular postmodern crucifix that signals the tribe, faith and allegiances of its wearer.