In September 2022, Duke brought together some prerecorded videos of high-profile figures to announce the launch of the university’s revolutionary “climate commitment.”
John Kerry, President Biden’s then special envoy for climate, congratulated Duke on its attempt to “continue to lead” the world. Alumnus Tim Cook, wearing a Duke polo, popped up on-screen to “commend … the entire Duke community for its focus on climate action.”
And, to really drive home Duke’s dedication to action, coach Mike Krzyzewski streamed in to emphasize the importance of “the whole Duke team” playing both “good offense” and “good defense.”
“This is the time to bring out our A game,” said Coach K.
For the university, that A game tipped off with an initial fund of $36 million for the climate commitment, framed as an unprecedented attempt to consolidate and leverage the university’s capabilities to address the climate crisis under one coordinating office.
Stocked with able and determined staff and administration, the climate commitment has coasted for nearly two years, buoyed by the fulfillment of a 2007 pledge to reach carbon neutrality by 2024. If given the money and mandate to succeed, the commitment could be a model for how an organization—especially one of the wealthiest universities in the world—could use its unique position to address the climate crisis.
But despite Coach K’s enthusiastic analogy, power at the university may not be so easily harnessed in the game of climate change. If the administration is the coaching staff, the school’s $11.6 billion endowment is the league itself, notoriously resistant to change. That’s why some students and faculty are worried that the commitment, with unclear goals and a lack of authority to make change where it matters most, will end up a well-intentioned failure.
Toddi Steelman, a coal miner’s daughter and West Virginia native, leads Duke’s climate commitment efforts.
Steelman earned a PhD at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment and taught environmental and sustainability policy for decades around the country before returning to Durham as dean of the Nicholas School until 2023. She now holds the dual titles of vice president and vice provost for climate and sustainability for the university.
The goal, Steelman says, is to “take the entire mission of the university … and force it through the lens of climate and sustainability.” That, first, meant taking the most obviously climate-related units—Duke’s campus farm, gardens, and forest—and uniting them under the climate commitment umbrella.
On a call recently, Steelman was excited to hear that some students were at least aware of the commitment. And she has a simple ask for skeptics: “I would invite people to look at what we’re doing,” she says. “Our actions speak louder than the words.”
Some students and staff do have well-founded reservations about the climate commitment. One of their largest concerns is that Duke still invests in fossil fuel companies.
“Until Duke pledges to total [fossil fuel] divestment, the Climate Commitment will remain a statement of utter hypocrisy,” wrote the Duke Climate Coalition, a student group, in the Duke Chronicle shortly after the climate commitment was announced.
Divestment, inspired by the 1980s movement that encouraged the university to divest from companies doing business with South Africa’s apartheid regime, is not new at Duke or other colleges.
The fossil fuel divestment debate has played out over the past decade in memos between an alphabet soup of Duke organizations, including the Duke Climate Coalition, formerly Divest Duke, and the Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility (ACIR), a group of faculty, administrators, alumni, a member of the board of trustees, and a few students, who provide recommendations for Duke University Management Co. (DUMAC). ACIR reports to the university president and was reorganized in 2013, in part to deal with earlier criticism about socially irresponsible investing.
DUMAC is a separate nonprofit support corporation founded to manage Duke’s endowment, pension assets, Duke Health’s investments, and the Duke Endowment, the trust established by the university’s founder. Students are quick to point out that DUMAC’s role is to grow the university’s assets, not to create a livable future.
The short story: In 2014, student-led Divest Duke proposed fossil fuel divestment, writing that Duke had the opportunity to “to claim the value and fame associated with being the first mover.” ACIR wrote back that there was “a lack of clarity that divestment will have the desired impact” and recommended against it. Students, faculty, and administrators have held their stances since, with some more back-and-forth dialogues (other universities, including Harvard, have since divested).
“We’ve had good conversations with administrators, but we’ve yet to see actually any concrete commitments to change,” says Brennan McDonald, a senior and co-president of Duke Climate Coalition. “Every time we try to address their issues with divestment, they come back with different reasons that negate all of our previous work.”
In 2022, the Climate Coalition placed a divestment referendum on Duke Student Government’s annual ballot asking students if they were “in favor of calling on Duke to permanently end all direct and indirect investments in companies that explore for or develop fossil fuels; and reinvest in sustainable businesses, industries, and funds.”
Of the 2,757 students who voted, roughly 90 percent said yes. And yet, nothing much happened.
That’s partly why some students see the university’s climate commitment as the administration’s attempt to slap a green sticker on Duke’s image without doing much work. And it doesn’t help that there are some lightweight sustainability measures promoted on Duke websites.
Professors can get a “green classroom certification” through a 25-question form that includes pledges to be mindful of paper consumption, turn lights off, and drink from reusable cups. Students can get their “green dorm certification” by promising to not abuse the thermostats—many of which are centrally controlled anyway. It seems a bit silly, especially if the focus is on shifting the economic weight of an $11.6 billion institution.
Some professors applaud the students’ work and are taking steps of their own.
Elizabeth Albright, a professor in environmental sciences and policy at the Nicholas School, also penned a Chronicle op-ed in October 2022 when the climate commitment was announced. Albright applauded its formation and echoed the students’ concerns that without “open communication, transparency, inclusive engagement, equity, and accountability,” the commitment would “ring hollow and be steeped in hypocrisy.”
“If we’re going to say we’re climate leaders, then we need to be climate leaders,” Albright says. “I’m not saying we need to divest tomorrow, but we need to engage on these issues and be willing to study them, be willing to be transparent, and be willing to act, but we’re not. I am not at all opposed to the climate commitment, but it needs to include the endowment. And I would like to see greater clarity in goals and measurement of those goals.”
Inspired by the basketball fans who sleep in tents outside of Cameron Indoor Stadium for tickets to the Duke-UNC game, Albright staged a mini-protest this year, sleeping outside of the Nicholas School for a week in order to have conversations with students about “transparency, engagement studies, goals, and accountability.”
Steelman and her office are in an odd spot: they don’t control the endowment, but they have much more contact with divestment-focused students and professors than the average DUMAC member does.
“Our students are passionate, they are filled with purpose, and that is one of the great engines of change in society at large,” Steelman says. “Now, it doesn’t mean we’re always going to agree.”
Steelman says divestment is an important part of the conversation but that “it’s a very tiny slice of what we’re trying to achieve institutionally.” She points to the university’s potential to have a positive impact through its thousands of graduates, research footprint, and external engagement.
Ultimately, Steelman and students believe in different rates of change. Students are only around for four years, and they’ve grown up hearing about how the world is falling apart. They’re driven by the urgency of knowing that they’ll be the ones alive to deal with the consequences of the foretold climate disaster. (The Climate Coalition’s most recent Chronicle op-ed flamed the administration for not committing to a “livable future.”)
Steelman recognizes that the climate commitment is inherently conservative—not in the political sense, but because it is built on the use of preexisting structures to make slow change.
“That [approach] presses up against the urgency of climate change. Which is like, ‘Good Lord, it is here. And now shouldn’t we be moving faster?’” Steelman says. “And the answer is yes. But the way you have durable change is by taking time and building the governance and institutional structures that really allow the effort to slowly gain momentum and enthusiasm.”
But doesn’t she wish students would stop asking her about divestment?
“Heck no,” Steelman says.
In the 2022 climate commitment announcement, Durham’s deputy city manager appeared via video to show the Bull City’s support. In the 2023 climate commitment report, though, the “community partnerships” portion is still suspiciously empty. That points to larger tensions between the university and the City of Durham, two entities which are, in many ways, the wayward children of the industrious Duke family.
Around the turn of the century, the tobacco entrepreneurs bought naming rights for the university, funding the construction of the campus. And downtown, the low bulk of Duke companies’ brick tobacco warehouses still holds firm against the proliferation of high-rise apartment buildings forcing their way skyward.
Climate is an issue that makes the importance of the town-and-gown relationship obvious—what happens to one happens to the other. But Bull City residents are skeptical after incidents like the failure of the intercounty light rail project, which Duke is blamed for permanently derailing.
It didn’t help Duke last year after a Nicholas School researcher found unsafe levels of lead in several Durham parks. The school—alongside some city officials—sat on the results for several months until a resident found the study online. Steelman, then the Nicholas School’s dean, publicly apologized for “not more proactively communicating” with residents sooner.
During his state of the city address this month, Mayor Leonardo Williams shouted out the university for its employment of more than 40,000 people and economic impact of over $1 billion. But there’s still an economic tension (as a nonprofit university, Duke doesn’t pay taxes on much of its massive landholdings in Durham) and a cultural tension (students tend to jet in for four short years, often not seeing much of Durham beyond a blurry view of Shooters on a Saturday night).
Those are just some of the reasons Steelman is moving forward cautiously.
“You don’t want to be working with local communities in ways that you cannot sustain because once you make a commitment to do something, you want to be able to follow through on it,” Steelman says.
As 2024 continues, Duke’s staff is confident it will meet the 2007 carbon-neutrality pledge. Matthew Arsenault, assistant director in the Office of Sustainability, says that’s the result of a three-part plan to “reduce, renew, and offset.” “Reducing,” referring to emissions, came about through steps like ending coal burning on campus. “Renewing” refers to renewable energy.
And “offsetting” means that at the end of the year, Arsenault and his coworkers will calculate Duke’s carbon impact and then essentially fund carbon reduction elsewhere in the world. That can look like anything from regenerative grazing to wetland restoration or landfill gas destruction.
If Duke wants to call itself carbon neutral, offsetting will be necessary for as long as the university is not running on entirely renewable energy. And because Duke Energy, one of the largest utility holding companies in the nation, powers the university, it would be difficult to ever say that Duke is entirely “clean” (both entities are named after the same 20th-century industrialist but are not otherwise directly related).
“Even if we shift to [a] full electric campus bus fleet, that electricity is coming from Duke Energy’s grid,” says Arsenault. “A lot of natural gas—and I believe even some coal is on there still. So yeah, there’s going to be emissions.”
Scholars and scientists beyond Duke have warned for years that those kinds of carbon offsetting and credit plans can create a false sense of progress—or give a university a way to call itself “carbon neutral” without actually making any change. Arsenault, who was himself a graduate student in Duke’s public policy school, says he’s an offset skeptic as well. He says that pushed him, alongside his coworker Emma Fulop, to create an extremely rigorous selection process when considering offsetting opportunities. He wants students to keep asking questions.
“When we release all the details on the offsets that we purchased, I want to have conversations with students, I want to show them, in the weeds, why we think this is good and answer any questions or even criticisms that they have,” Arsenault says.
The students certainly have questions. According to McDonald, the Duke Climate Coalition co-president, carbon neutrality was an ambitious goal when it was originally conceived in 2007.
“They’ve yet to really follow up with anything as comprehensive,” says McDonald.
Arsenault is part of the ongoing conversations about the next set of climate goals. And like McDonald and Albright, he wants to see some ambition.
“2024 carbon neutrality is … a giant milestone for the university, but it’s just that—it’s a milestone. It’s not like we’re done,” Arsenault says.
He ultimately believes in the core mission of the university as the best path to change.
“The stuff on campus that we do is important, but it pales in comparison to the influence we have with these young people that are going to go change the world,” he says. “The way Duke makes a big impact is by teaching the next generation of climate activists, of climate workers, of climate scientists.”
Past organizing efforts have depended heavily on a small number of passionate individuals leading to movement in fits and starts. And in less than a month, much of the leadership behind Duke’s current climate organizing body will graduate.
They’re working on transitioning to the next generation of leaders while continuing to push for divestment. This month, the Climate Coalition organized a protest on the quad during alumni weekend, trying to convince alums to withhold their donations until Duke divests.
There are also small signs that ACIR is open to keeping the conversation going.
McDonald has been a co-moderator in a seminar series on investment responsibility, organized in collaboration with the climate commitment. Next month, the ACIR chair is having a public conversation with students from the Climate Coalition. McDonald is optimistic that future students will continue to engage, helping the administration put on aggressive offense and defense to make Coach K’s strained analogy proud.
As long as the shot clock hasn’t run out by then.
Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].