Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about the latest bad idea from the nation’s oldest university.
Harvard University, under pressure from the Trump administration to reduce the power held by faculty “more committed to activism than scholarship,” is poised to approve a new major in “Energy, Climate, and Environment.” The major is spearheaded by a professor who co-chaired an activist group that pushed Harvard to divest from fossil fuels and demanded that the university “Provide funds and staff for faculty engaging in advocacy on climate change in Massachusetts and at the national/international level.”
The proposed major is already being mocked by Matthew Kahn, who is provost professor of economics at the University of Southern California and a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. In a post on Substack, Kahn called the major ideologically “slanted.”
“It looks to me like the fix is in!” he wrote, faulting Harvard for failing to cover free-market environmentalism. He advised, “Parents should have questions about what actual skills does this major emphasize and what job trajectories does it open up?”
Kahn also expressed concern that the science and math in the major would be at high school rather than college level.
Harvard’s vice provost for climate and sustainability, James Stock, who served as a member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2013-2014, insisted to the Washington Free Beacon in a phone interview that Harvard has “a commitment to making this rigorous.” Said Stock, who has been involved in planning for the major, “there’s going to be a statistics requirement.”
Kahn is skeptical. “There is so much subject matter to cover and the faculty in Physics, atmospheric sciences, chemistry just assume that the students don’t know the core math and basic science here so they teach as if the students are 13 years old. I saw this at UCLA. The lowest common denominator problem emerges in these interdisciplinary programs. This creates both a negative selection effect and ultimately a weak treatment effect,” he wrote, using social science lingo to suggest that the weakest students choose such majors and that the students don’t learn much.
