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This fall the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hosted several events related to its common reading assignment, Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer. The book is a non-fiction argument by the author in favor of not eating animals, primarily because of his compunctions over their treatment in factory farms.

Not one that especially lends itself to stage adaptation, I’d think, but it looks like UNC students made do with rubber chickens, dance, and multimedia in a multi-performance play this month. The adapter and director, UNC professor of communication studies Tony Perucci, said, ”As much as this show intends to be a critical reflection on how we engage with daily practices, it’s also intended to be abundantly silly and absurd. And beautiful.”

In October UNC sponsored as guest speaker animal activist Gene Bauer, who “told his audience there are no humane ways to raise animals for food.” The News & Observer reported that “None challenged Baur at the UNC-CH gathering.” At least one reader of the News & Observer, however, disapproved of the uncritical coverage of Baur’s presentation.

Two other institutions, Duke University and St. Michael’s College in Vermont, also chose Eating Animals as common reading assignments this year, as documented in NAS’s report Beach Books: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class?

When he told a Caltech research group that it was using more energy than any other lab on the campus, he recalls, “everyone applauds and high-fives each other in the room, because that says, We must be doing twice the amount of work.”

They must have missed the sustainability memo.

The editors write, “As students who have not studied the minute details of the carbon footprint left by Harvard University Dining’s Services’ operations, it’s difficult to assess how much of an environmental difference the dining staff’s demands would actually effect. ” They aren’t convinced that the union workers are really that into being eco-friendly:

onlookers should have good reason to be skeptical whether a marriage of convenience isn’t really the major motivating factor behind this move. To that end, Harvard and UNITE HERE—the HUHDS’ staff union—should, at the very least, investigate more seriously whether in-sourcing this massive culinary production will really be greener before making any decision on so-called environmental grounds. We’d be curious to know.

But, the editors agree, anything that will improve the quality of Harvard’s dining hall food – which is apparently less than elite – would be welcome, whether or not it benefits the environment.

In the words of Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars, a university has a four-fold mission:  pursuit of truth, transmission of ethics, cultivation of character, and preparation for professional life.

He was quoting from Dr. Wood’s 2009 lecture in Switzerland on the Sustainability Movement in the American University.

The National Association of Scholars has issued an official statement critiquing the campus “sustainability” movement and suggesting paths to improvement. “Sustainability,” of course, sounds like a wonderful idea. We all want to preserve the earth for future generations. But there’s much more to this movement than the encouragement of environmental stewardship.

One of the key problems with it, seen on college campuses today, is that it closes debates that should be open. Sustainability advocates assume that the answers are already in. They take it for granted that the earth is running out of key resources, that we have to change our ways if the earth is to survive, and that capitalism has been getting in the way of social justice.

Colleges and universities should raise questions about how to deal with scarcity, and we should study and debate sustainability’s pillars, and they should be open to hearing competing ideas. Campus actions for sustainability today, however, largely bypass the faculty and the scholarly scrutiny that faculty members could provide. Initiatives such as the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, for example, require college presidents to set the agenda for their institutions.

It all comes back to remembering the fundamental purpose of higher education. Contrary to popular belief, its purpose is not to transform society through social activism. Its purposes are to provide students with sound education through rigorous study, to prepare them for work, to transmit civilization’s legacy, and to help them grow into adulthood. Instilling prescribed attitudes is outside that mission.

We at NAS recommend that colleges and universities treat sustainability as an object of inquiry rather than a set of assumed precepts. Only if institutions insist on scholarly examination will “sustainability,” as an academic enterprise, have a shot at being really sustainable.

The words sustainability, conservation and conservatism are linked. They suggest protection of the status quo. Until the Progressive era Americans were not concerned with conservation because they assumed that progress would make life better. Sustaining the status quo paled beside a glowing manifest destiny. Perhaps today’s progressive interest in sustainability is an admission that the left is not progressive but conservative.

We ought to dissect the claims of the sustainability ideologues. Malthus made the argument for the inevitability of scarcity at the beginning of the 19th century. The explosion of technological innovation in Jacksonian, laissez faire America proved Malthus wrong. After nearly two centuries of economic progress, the 20th century’s Progressivism stalled progress and reduced Americans’ expectations to the point where the claim that sustainability is progressive is made with a straight face.

If Allen’s prediction comes true, however, I won’t be complaining.

This post by Melinda Moyer describes how so-called “green” household cleaners aren’t any less toxic than regular household cleaners.  In fact, almost any product can claim to be “green” because there are no laws regulating that.  From the piece:

The core of the problem is that there are no laws regulating green marketing, so a company can say its product is all-natural or non-toxic without having to prove anything or even disclose its ingredients on the bottle.

What about organic farming?  Isn’t that supposed to be “green,” too?  Not really.  A recent article by John Stossel in Reason describes how free-range beef, which is marketed partially based on how good it is for the environment, actually emits more greenhouse gases than regular farming methods.  And another article from Discovery News reports on research from the University of Copenhagen which concluded that organic vegetables aren’t any healthier than conventional vegetables.

So, what we’ve got is an industry selling you an idea:  The idea that “natural” is good, and “unnatural” is bad.  This misleads the public into rejecting modern technology and conventional agricultural practices, including techniques like genetic modification.

Does that make organic and green products a scam?  I don’t know, but they sure are expensive.

Alex B. Berezow is the Editor of RealClearScience.  He holds a Ph.D. in microbiology.

There are a few things in this video to be concerned about. The effort to “induce a culture change,” to “incorporate those principles  into our daily decisions,” is all part of the steady movement to guide people into a particular, “correct” way of thinking and acting. The removal of trays from dining halls is a perfect example of this. It’s a relatively small change, but it’s a daily reinforcement of new habits. I wrote about this in “Tray Chic.” And the young woman with the title “sustainability fellow” is one of the new generation of activists that self-reproduces. Activist administrators recruit students to get involved on campus and hire them once they graduate so they will become activist administrators. The recycling process thus applies to people, not just plastic.

I wrote about the anti-bottled water movement a couple years ago here. It’s amazing to me that universities are taking away students’ rights to purchase something (very healthy and wholesome) that they are willing to purchase. Yes, tap water is free, and wherever it is clean enough to drink it’s a good idea to take advantage of that and save money. But if people want to pay for water, they shouldn’t be banned from doing so.

The anti-bottled water movement is part of sustainability’s “change daily habits” strategy. Sustainability advocates seek to change our attitudes, values, and behavior, so they enact policies that train people to make small, daily adjustments by increments, until we’ve made it the basis for our moral compass. The campus “trayless dining” movement is also part of this strategy.

This recent race to ban bottled water strikes me as inimical to freedom. It could also turn out to be one of those bans that make the embargoed item even more alluring. There may soon be black market bottled water sales in dark corners of college campuses. Be on the watch for guilty-looking students hiding Evians in their backpacks until they can sneak sips back in their dorm rooms.