Ciarán Ó hÓgartaigh
This is a generous book. From its introduction and throughout, it invites debate and invokes a sense of openness, a sense of hope as the subtitle suggests.
It also invites an insertion of oneself: What can I do? What could I have done better? I come to these questions as a former university president at the University of Galway, and a former business school dean at the UCD Smurfit School.
This is, I hope, a response to the book as a retrospective self-criticism. There is a tradition, particularly in the US, of former university presidents engaging in debate on policy issues and a long critical history of university president memoirs.2 Others, no doubt, will have very different perspectives, but the best I can give is mine. As the author herself says (p. 8), I too journey and ‘offer these ideas for climate justice universities with hope and humility’. I approached this book curious whether it would have exemplars of climate justice activism and the university. It does. Having convincingly outlined the need for climate justice and the university in its first chapter, the book does an excellent job tracing the paths already taken, the activism underway. It gives many real examples of resisting, reclaiming and restructuring for a hopeful future, framed in chapters addressing the need for relearning as a starting point (chapter 2) and ‘exnovation’ and knowledge co-creation as an objective (chapter 3), underpinned by regenerative financial structures (chapter 4). The ‘how to’ as well as the ‘why’ is therefore addressed.
Thought provoking as it is, the book has two early provocative assertions: ‘Changing a university is like moving a graveyard – you don’t get much help from the inside’ (p. 4) and ‘the famous quote by Black feminist activist Audre Lorde – “the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house”’ (p. 60).
The first of these prompts the questions: What is ‘a university’? Who is ‘the university’? Who benefits from the absence of change?
The second is entirely understandable but to me begged the question why not? Why not find allies for change in ‘the Master’s house’? By the end of the book, I had changed my mind on this.
What – or who – is ‘the university’?
‘The university’ is in the title of the book. It provokes but does not address the question about the persona of a university, what is it, who is it? In my experience, people generally define ‘the university’ as something other than themselves: an amorphous sense of an institution and/or ‘management’ (in Galway, ‘the Quad’, in UCD the Tierney Building). However, universities are the people in them. Universities are communities of students, faculty, professional staff, technicians. If and how universities change – or not – is a consequence of their communities. ‘The management’ can often impede change and sometimes effectuate change, but real change is cultural.
The book focuses to a great extent on faculty initiatives, faculty initiatives for change. In doing so, it has less mention than warranted of the power of students and the potential role of ‘management’.
Students, understandably, have the greatest interest in climate change and climate justice. This is their future. Students are therefore often the activists in climate justice. Students’ unions throughout Ireland have sustainability officers and, in my experience, these are serious, conscientious advocates for climate justice. Further, in developing a university view on Israel–Palestine, human rights students in Galway were my best teachers, navigating the importance of language (Palestine as well as Gaza, justice beyond the two- state solution, condemning violence and hostage-taking, differentiating between our Jewish students and the State of Israel)3
While the book does an excellent job at cataloguing faculty activism and/or faculty-student activism, it speaks less of the potential and power of students in advocating and acting for change, demanding new programmes of teaching and research, being the change in the curriculum. There is no substantive mention of, for example, student protests or of student movements and activism, such as the Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change or the World’s Youth for Climate Justice. Together these two student groups have successfully petitioned the International Court of Justice to provide an opinion on the obligations states have to tackle climate change and the legal consequences if they fail to do so.4 Students can be the best allies for change. In my experience, politicians understandably pay more heed to students than to faculty or other university leadership. There are more of them. They are invested in their future, and they are in tune with the tides of the times. Most of all, although the idea is sometimes resisted, they are the reason universities exist.
The tools of the master’s house
To my surprise, I also appear in the book. I didn’t expect that. The context is a meeting in Galway of ‘over one hundred academics and activists from universities throughout the island of Ireland’ in early November 2023 ‘for an all-day discussion focused on what higher education institutions should do about the planetary crisis’ (p. 22). In my remarks, I invited a follow-up to the meeting and was afterwards sent a prècis and some suggested next steps. I was very conscious at the time of the clear sense from the Galway meeting that this was a collaborative effort with ‘an intentional resistance to conventional academic hierarchies’ and that ‘the collective focus on the higher education as a whole dissipated any sense of competition among institutions’ (p. 25). In this spirit of collaboration and cooperation, I undertook to bring the discussion to the Irish Universities Association. There was little appetite and avenue for this when I did so. Other issues such as university funding and the conflict in Israel–Palestine as well as the exigencies of the everyday were on people’s minds. In the spirit of reflection prompted by the book, I am sorry now and was sorry then that I did not do more. I should have engaged more with an interesting and active group, which has subsequently emerged as the Climate Justice Universities Union.
A challenge of the desired distributed approach among university leaders is that some are allies and some are not. In the Summer of 2024, I attended a meeting in Leinster House between university presidents and members of the Dáil and Seanad. During the meeting, Catherine Connolly, the independent TD from Galway, remarked forcefully that universities have maintained and propagated social inequality and asked what we were going to do about it, also the tone of this book. I was of the view that there was merit in the argument. Leaving through the gates onto Kildare Street, another university president vehemently took issue with this view of the world: there was no basis to it, it was absurd.
My point is that it is difficult enough to garner change in one institution, never mind in more than one. Each university will have its personality; some will be guardians of the status quo, in stasis, statist, and others are loci of change. I could have done more arising from that meeting in Galway for sure, should have engaged more in the moment and should have asked for licence to ally with universities of an equal mind: it would not have been ‘collective’, including all universities, but Galway would not have been the only one. But there is also a wider lesson here. University leadership is not homogeneous and not, as it sometimes portrayed (though, in fairness, not in this book), all bad. As well as extending the story of student activism and finding in students the fulcrum of change, I would also encourage those seeking to infuse universities with a climate justice approach to find allies in university leadership. Some may disagree, some may be greenwashing, but not all. However, they are also not the only variables of change…
Moving a graveyard
The book has several examples of institutional architectures supporting climate justice. Some of these, such as RISE (illustrated visually on p. 189), are broad coalitions of research activism that transcend a single institution but which nonetheless arose from one (in the case of RISE, the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley). Another is the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (DRIFT), which was part of the Erasmus University Rotterdam before being, extraordinarily, ‘kicked out because its approach was deemed non-academic’ (p. 143). DRIFT ‘became an independent company (still under the holding of the university)’ and ‘gained a reputation in the Netherlands and beyond for innovative, engaged sustainable transitions work’ (p. 210). ‘By all academic measures, DRIFT became even more successful when released from the constraints of academic institutions’ (p. 212).
As another model, I would add Te Waňanga o Raukawa, a Maori tertiary- education provider in Otaki, New Zealand. I visited there in 2005 with a group of accounting academics. We were hosted by its founder, Whatarangi Winiata, who had been professor of accounting at Victoria University of Wellington. A visionary and an immense presence in his community as founding president of the Maori Party, he was asked whether his faculty published in peer-reviewed journals. His answer was memorable to me: he said that peer-reviewed journals defined quality in a different way and had different values than did his iwi –his people.
These expressions and experiences of change – RISE, DRIFT, Te Waňanga o Raukawa – pose a question that is at the heart of this book: whether the climate justice university is best established in the existing frameworks of mainstream universities or whether they require and demand a new frame of reference, an entirely different envisioning of university which, as Whatarangi Winiata argues, defines ‘quality’ in a different way and has different values. Can climate justice academics thrive in the context of traditional university structures with its mainstream values and definition of ‘quality’? In starting this book, my sense was that they could and should, that the conundrum is finding a way to change the university from within to address the issues of the day and of the future. However, this book brought me to doubt and to reflect on a different view: the need for a radical re-articulation of the role and nature of the university. This is partly also a reflection on the chance for change in universities, the moving of the graveyard.
Speaking again of the university of community, in whose interest is the absence of change, in whose interest is the status quo? Not students. Sometimes but not always university leadership. In my experience, the greatest resistance to change is from the faculty itself, often in surprising moments. As the book points out (p. 4), ‘universities are notoriously resistant to change because academic work tends to reinforce disciplinary boundaries and uphold institutional traditions’ and (p. 219), ‘each university and every higher education system is embedded within the context of its institutional history.’
The book also comments (p. 126) that ‘when academic systems reward competitive, individualistic scholars and dismiss and disregard those with more holistic and collective priorities, disconnection and isolation define and frame university research.’ This is true. But, except in universities with dictatorial leadership, and there are some of those, promotion processes and the ‘false meritocracy’ that they ‘nurture’ (p. 126) are populated by the faculty. The faculty self-establish their frames of reference and, in an act of un-unlearning, generally promote people of the same criteria as themselves. Universities that aspire to recognition, reputation, and rankings in the mainstream will adopt mainstream criteria, such as peer-review, grant capture. Kindness does not feature as a factor for promotion.
Faculty, as illustrated in this book, can be the most radical, passionate, and imaginative forces for change but also the most conservative, irredentist, and obstructive. The challenge the book presents to university presidents interested in that direction of change is to empower and unencumber activist faculty, many of whom are suspicious of ‘management’, uncomfortable with hierarchy and the ‘tools of the Master’s house’, sometimes with good reason: ‘incentives to empower people to make alternative choices need to be integrated’ (p. 214).
Unlearning
One of the tendencies of education is that we replicate ourselves and teach how we ourselves were taught. This is particularly true of higher education, where until recently there was little or no training in pedagogy or in how to ‘draw out’ (educare) our students. My generation in particular was recruited and entered the classroom with little or no guidance on teaching and little or no teaching practice. This carries on traditions, but it does so without much need or opportunity for ‘unlearning’, ‘the process of letting go of existing and constraining knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, and assumptions to allow for new perspectives and information that may not align with our previous understanding’ (p. 92).
Accounting is my disciplinary area. In my undergraduate degree in Galway, I was fortunate to have been exposed to the sense of accounting as a social science. Professor Séamus Collins had completed his PhD at Northwestern and brought with him the idea that accounting is the consequence of a political process: things are as they are because the political context has made them so.
True to teaching as one was taught, in the introduction to my accounting courses, I tried to develop this idea of accounting by asking my students who they thought carried most risk in engaging with a company. We discussed a long list of ‘stakeholders’, including shareholders, employees, creditors, customers, suppliers, government, the general public and the company’s neighbours. In over thirty years of teaching, students identified shareholders every time as the group taking the most risk.
We would then consider that shareholders can have a portfolio that diversifies risk. Employees – and the company’s neighbours – cannot. The maximum loss to a shareholder is their investment to the company. Employees – and the company’s neighbours – can lose their livelihoods and, even more seriously, life and limb. I would often conclude by rhetorically asking the question who they thought carried the most risk from the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, the shareholders or its neighbours. This exercise rarely if ever prompted a further discussion.
On reading this book, this need for unlearning came to mind. Society and schooling, perhaps even other modules they were taking, ingrained the idea that shareholders carry risk to the exclusion of everybody else. This is a social construct, hard to shake in the experience of decades.
However, it also reflected something else that the book does not grapple with as much as it should. Students studying accounting wanted to prepare for their professional exams and get a job in the profession. What were seen as esoteric questions were not of interest, evidenced also by the decades-long decline of already small numbers in accounting theory modules.
This is true not only of accounting but of university modules more generally. In Ireland in particular, but elsewhere as well, our history of deprivation and displacement makes us pragmatic. Prospectuses of university courses are expected to have exemplars of job prospects, sometimes stretching to do so. Parents demand it. Media summaries always pick up on ‘career opportunities’.
Students, understandably, have the greatest interest in climate change and climate justice. This is their future. However, the sad truth is that the great swell of student demand is employment-driven. Does the ‘climate justice university’ matter in students’ minds? Universities are in that sense creatures of the society of which they are a part.
Similarly, the book has an interesting focus on exnovation research, ‘the [urgent] need for research on how to dismantle, disrupt and move away from harmful extractive and exploitative systems’ (p. 134). This is a retreat – or, more so – an advance in thinking. The conventional view of the need for economic growth assumes ‘that human ingenuity, when it is directed at advancing the common good, can raise global output indefinitely without affecting the biosphere so adversely that it is tipped into a state far-removed from where it has been since long before human societies began to form’5. However, the conviction that global economic growth is limited because the biosphere is ‘bounded’ has become a strand of economics research in itself, convincingly characterised in recent economics literature by Garupta, Parrique and Susskind.6 An Irish Times review of this literature by Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe gives an insight into a reflective policy-maker’s view of the challenges: ‘as policymakers act on these challenges they must address a new reality’, what he terms a ‘faltering consensus regarding the importance of climate change’.7
Reclaiming and restructuring
Whether we accept the ‘faltering consensus’ or not, or like it or not, universities are shaped by their democratic settings. This applies also to their funding, which is elegantly illustrated in figure 5 of the book (p. 160). At the fulcrum of that illustration is ‘reduced public spending’: ‘the financialisation of universities has been accelerated by the decrease in public funding for higher education’ (p. 161). The book discusses the deleterious consequences of this in the UK and the US. It also argues for the ‘localisation’ of universities, ‘co- designing and co-creating with communities’ (p. 197) as well as a ‘new level of commitment to both localism and global solidarity’ (p. 203). In this part of the book, the contribution of some Irish universities to their communities, through institutional and/or individual effort, is understated. There is also a symbiosis in Ireland as a small country on the edge of Europe between serving local needs and international ambition.
However, public funding in Ireland is predicated in part on growth in student numbers and, in research, partnerships with industry,8 no exnovation here. Radical change towards the climate justice university therefore requires radical change in demand for programmes and in university funding. This is a function of democracy, in need of public support. Students, student activism, advocacy and demand for courses not just for their employment potential is the democratic movement that will catalyse change, not only in universities but in realising what Garupta calls the ‘economics of biodiversity’9. Further, as the book concludes, ‘reclaiming and restructuring higher education systems, therefore, requires political engagement from individuals beyond those that currently work or study at universities’ (p. 226).
I am particularly convinced by the book’s advocacy that, as institutions of learning, universities should learn. While research is itself a form of learning, the book argues, it is often circular and self-fulfilling in its epistemology. So the need for institutional learning – and it is a need – is a challenging one. Strangely enough, where it was most demanded in my career was from MBA students who saw themselves as ‘customers’, requiring among many other things that the curriculum bend to their practical will, accommodate their experiences. Classes were therefore most likely to be discursive and critical, although in a way that reinforced rather than challenged practice and conventional wisdom, however flawed. Empowering students is part of an unlearning, though not as ‘customers’ or conveyors of convention but as map makers and co-creators of change.
Finishing where I started, I came to this book thinking that we needed to be in tune with students as key actors in climate justice universities and thinking that radical institutional change within existing structures would be the way. I remain convinced of the former but have changed my mind on the latter. The book is replete with convincing examples of the necessary radical change through new movements, outside the walls, or through coalitions of the committed, breaking down walls.
The graveyard is not moved using the tools from the Master’s house. The book has thus provoked in me a learning, or an unlearning, as it will in others. What greater compliment for a book? What can I do? What could I have done better?
Professor Ciarán Ó hÓgartaigh is former President of the University of Galway. He has published widely on financial reporting and on accounting history in international peer-reviewed publications, and he has held academic leadership posts in a number of countries.
Notes
- J. C. Stephens, Climate Justice and the University: Shaping a Hopeful Future for All (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024).
- See, for example, N. B. Dirks, City Of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University (Cambridge University Press, 2024); D. C. Gilman, The Building of the University: An Inaugural Address (John H. Carmany, 1872); C. Kerr, The Uses of the University (Harvard University Press, 2001).
- See the University of Galway’s University of Sanctuary Programme, ‘Israel–Palestine’, www. niversityofgalway.ie/sanctuary/israel-palestine//. Note the learning between the statements of 18 October 2023 and 6 February 2024. At the same time, other universities were invoking the sixty-year old Kalven Report, which claims universities should be neutral. As we know, and as the book argues, no institution is neutral.
- Isabella Kaminski, Whether You Win or Lose, Some Fights Are Worth Fighting’, BBC (website), 23 July 2025 www.bbc.com/future/article/20250721-how-a-bold-student-plan-swept-to-un-world- court
- Partha Dasgupta, The Economics of Biodiversity (HM Treasury 2021), p. 4, www.gov.uk/ government/publications/final-report-the-economics-of-biodiversity-the-dasgupta-review
- P. Garupta, On Natural Capital: The Value of the World around Us (Witness Books, 2025);T. Parrique, Slow Down or Die: The Economics of Degrowth, trans. by Claire Benoit (Profile Books, 2025); D. Susskind, Growth: A Reckoning (Allen Lane, 2024).
- Paschal Donohue, ‘Books That Advise Us on How to Run Our Economies and Save the Planet’, Irish Times, 26 July 2025.
- Although, while the book argues (p. 86) for increased emphasis on social science research and climate change, recent awards by the EPA in Ireland do include several projects exploring community attitudes and transformations: https://www.epa.ie/our-services/research/epa–research-funding/ call-resultsawards/2024-epa-research-awards/. The newly-founded research funding agency, Taighde Éireann, has a wider remit than its predecessor, SFI. The fruits of this remain to be seen.
- Garupta, On Natural Capital.
