The climate crisis has arrived. From wildfires incinerating neighborhoods in Los Angeles, to Hurricane Helene’s devastation of the Southeast, to floods displacing Vermonters near Dartmouth’s campus, extreme weather events are harming communities across the country.
Colleges have an opportunity to educate a generation of leaders to tackle climate change head on. Our College’s mission reads: “Dartmouth educates the most promising students and prepares them for a lifetime of learning and of responsible leadership.” The Dartmouth Climate Futures Initiative student engagement process provides a blueprint for how we can live up to this exciting vision. We can build a Dartmouth that shines as a beacon of climate learning, action, and hope.
CFI, led by professor and special advisor to the provost Laura Ogden, was a one-year effort in 2024 to “map out a vision for the future of climate teaching and scholarship at Dartmouth.” CFI exists under Dartmouth’s Climate Collaborative. The prospect of institutional commitment to climate education excited me. I reached out to Ogden to advocate for meaningful inclusion of student voices. Our conversation led to an internship with CFI in fall 2024, through which I coordinated the Initiative’s student engagement process.
Student engagement had two parts. First, students responded to recommendations from faculty colloquia, which composed the majority of CFI. Second, students generated new visions. We employed different mediums in order to reach a wide swath of campus: I organized a student workshop, an interactive exhibit in Berry Library, a survey and a seven-member student advisory council incorporating voices from across campus. Each of those members conducted two hours of fieldwork in their own campus communities about students’ experiences with climate education. The incorporation of student perspectives felt groundbreaking because it encouraged students to act as active designers, instead of passive recipients, of their own education.
Below, I share two lessons from CFI’s innovative student engagement process and four specific recommendations about how this college can equip students to act as thoughtful and impactful citizens of a world wracked by climate crisis.
Lesson 1: Student voices can fundamentally shape Dartmouth’s academic priorities.
CFI consistently brought together Dartmouth students with passionate and inspiring visions for the future of climate education. This ranged from our sticky-note filled brainstorming workshop, to the hundreds of students who walked by our library tactile display hourly, to the dozens of imaginative responses from majors across disciplines on our survey. It felt momentous for students to shape the future of climate education. The student engagement process directly led to recommendations including a fund for student-led climate research and activism; expanding action-oriented learning, like climate study abroad programs; hiring professors who study climate in the math, computer science, economics and government departments and developing guidance for climate careers. Today, CFI proposals won’t move forward until College leaders decide to fund them. If Dartmouth acts on the scale the climate crisis demands and funds these recommendations, climate education and scholarship will touch every part of the school. The creativity and empowerment fostered by meaningful inclusion of student voices will echo across campus.
Lesson 2: Funding student priorities offers an opportunity for Dartmouth’s administration to repair broken student trust.
The lack of trust in Dartmouth’s administration created barriers to CFI’s ability to engage students. Students expressed concern that the Climate Collaborative was greenwashing and motivated by reputation. Moreover, students shared skepticism about claims of listening to students in light of the College’s crackdown on student activism last year. Student animosity toward senior leadership will hinder Dartmouth’s ability to learn from and empower students unless the administration listens to student concerns and adequately responds. To regain trust, the administration should fund classes and programs which reflect student needs. Walking the walk is the best way for Dartmouth to demonstrate its genuine commitment to transformative climate research and education.
Moreover, four core educational recommendations about how to cultivate climate citizens emerged from CFI’s student feedback data.
1. Experiential learning
Picture winterim study abroad courses where students study Indigenous ecologies in New Zealand, environmental justice in L.A. or glacial engineering in the Arctic. These classes would combine the action-oriented nature of Sustainability Office Immersion Trips with the rigor of existing +1 programs in Jewish Studies and Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages. It is also key to introduce students to the power of local leadership. Dartmouth can do this through courses where students learn from and impact climate work on campus and in the Upper Valley. Existing options, including the Energy Justice Clinic and CFI’s Community Partnerships for Climate Resilience classes, are very popular with students and already oversubscribed.
2. Introduce courses and programs that develop students’ abilities to analyze and intervene in the power structures driving climate change
Imagine a series of workshops that bring climate leaders to campus. These could be modeled on the Irving Institute’s bootcamps on electricity grids and markets and clean energy finance. Students could explore climate litigation under the guidance of experts from Vermont Law and Graduate School and delve into tribal climate action and resilience with alumni.
Students seek more opportunities to study climate from a political and economic perspective. Courses that instill the art of citizenship empower students to act on the issues they study: the Government Department could hire faculty to teach about the successes and failures of recent climate policy, while Economics could introduce students to circular economies and climate risk.
3. Funding for student-led projects and conferences
Dartmouth should follow Middlebury College’s lead and establish a student-led project fund for Dartmouth students to attend New York climate, document flooding in the Upper Valley on film, or solarize their Living Learning Community. These experiences are transformative but hard to find and expensive to attend without financial support. Dartmouth should help students overcome these barriers.
4. Support for career paths which advance climate action and environmental justice
Imagine a climate fellowship modeled off the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy’s First Year program, which connects students to alumni mentors for impactful summer jobs. Students could cover the climate crisis at leading outlets, craft groundbreaking models, and work with coastline communities to design adaptations for a rising ocean.
CFI teaches that all of us benefit when colleges and universities uplift student voices. However, over the long term, Dartmouth and other schools must do more. The College should listen to students calling for curricular change, from action-oriented climate education to an Asian American Studies Department. A replication of CFI’s in-depth student engagement for other decisions is a fantastic place to start. But we cannot wait for this to happen of its own accord. Remember that CFI engaged students only because students, faculty and staff stepped up to make it happen. All of us possess the obligation and opportunity to advocate for genuine incorporation of student voice: we are the leaders we have been waiting for.
The climate crisis demands nothing less than higher education’s full commitment to developing a generation of climate justice leaders. I sincerely hope that Dartmouth will listen to the student priorities outlined by CFI when allocating funding. Innovative changes at Dartmouth can further empower our generation to build the just, sustainable world we need.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
