US Higher education and fossil fuels: the limits of liberalism in university climate action

ABSTRACTUS universities have positioned themselves in recent years as sites of progressive green action, cutting-edge research, and student-driven change. These universities have even been exported to wealthy oil-dependent states in the Arabian Peninsula under the guise of developing their societies away from fossil fuels through liberal education. These countries, however, have developed their national strategies within imperial relationships with Great Britain and then the United States, in part to uphold the prosperity of the West and its development of liberal democratic ideologies and institutions, of which higher education has played a central part. Drawing on research within US branch campuses in Qatar, and focusing specifically on Texas A&M Qatar, an engineering school that is a site of what we call ‘petro-education’, we trace how these US universities reproduce the fossil fuel industry’s operations. Bringing this research in conversation with scholarship that challenges the liberal mythologies of US higher education, we argue that US universities largely remain embedded in a broader agenda to reconcile the climate crisis with what appears to be a greener capitalism that extends fossil fuel extraction into the future.KEYWORDS: Universitiesclimate justicefossil fuelsengineeringQatar Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 The research drawn on in this paper had both IRB approval from Danya Al-Saleh’s home institution University of Wisconsin – Madison IRB (Study # 2017-0062) and a local IRB approval in Qatar through Georgetown University at Qatar (IRB Study # 2018-0397) for a study titled “The role of engineering education and expertise in Qatar’s transition to a knowledge-based economy.” All participants went through the informed consent process, however, signatures were waived. All interviews conducted are anonymized and all references to people interviewed are pseudonyms. Any potentially identifiable titles, career trajectories or positions have been changed to further anonymize interviews.Additional informationNotes on contributorsDanya Al-SalehDanya Al-Saleh is an Assistant Professor in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.Neha VoraNeha Vora is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of International Studies at the American University of Sharjah.