Chris Cargill: Gonzaga’s climate change events: activism vs. intellectual honesty

By Chris Cargill

Higher education is supposed to be an incubator for thought and challenging ideas. It’s a place where students are trained in the core skills of independent, critical thinking that they will use their entire lives.

If you’re a fair-minded current student, graduate with student loans, parent helping pay for tuition or even a donor, you want to know the educational experience offered to future generations will be well-rounded.

So it was curious this past month to receive an email from Gonzaga University announcing the launch of the school’s “Center for Climate, Society and the Environment.” Today – Earth Day – Gonzaga will hold a virtual event to start the new center.

Normally, a new center on campus would be an exciting addition. But how the university is launching it highlights a larger problem in higher education.

Gonzaga has invited controversial speaker Bill McKibben to its kickoff event. McKibben is the “founder of the global climate action group 350.org” and is an associate of Seattle’s radical, socialist city council member Kshama Sawant. He has said global warming is a “world war.”

“I think civil disobedience is a really good idea,” McKibben said in 2014, speaking alongside Sawant and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.

In February, McKibben boasted on Twitter about using children to advance his political views. “Middle schoolers are already fantastic climate activists,” he said.

McKibben is a philosophy professor and a radical activist, not a scientist.

Neither is Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. Inslee wrote a book about climate change in 2007 that contained many predictions that turned out to be wrong. Under his leadership, Washington’s CO2 emissions have consistently increased, despite the governor’s promises.

Inslee calls climate change an “existential crisis,” but twice over the past five years opposed a state carbon tax simply because it didn’t raise taxes enough.

Curiously, Gonzaga University has invited both Gov. Inslee and McKibben – people on the ideological fringe of climate debates – to help them launch their new center and give opinions about climate change.

Will there be other points of view allowed at the Gonzaga event?

There are important questions we should be asking about climate change, and the consistent failure of past predictions to come true. Are there things we’re doing correctly to address the problem? Can technology and market incentives provide the best solutions?

Students likely won’t get many answers from Inslee and McKibben at the University-sponsored event. But they did get a more-rounded conversation earlier this week.

Washington Policy Center’s Gonzaga University club also talked about climate change on Tuesday. The difference is the student club’s event featured a balanced panel – two in favor of actions such as the Green New Deal and more government action, and two experts who favored a free-market approach using innovation from the private sector.

Chris Barnard of the American Conservation Coalition, Steve Ghan of the Citizens Climate Lobby, Todd Myers of Washington Policy Center and Eric DePlace of the Sightline Institute took part in the student-organized discussion. All agree climate change is an issue. The disagreement was on how best to address it.

In other words, the student-sponsored event promoted critical thinking and gave the GU community a broader perspective. It provided intellectual honesty and diversity. It is everything the university-sponsored panel should be.

Stifling debate and limiting the courteous exchange of ideas on college campuses is, unfortunately, nothing new. Students know it and are hungering for more viewpoints. Administrators, however, seem slow to catch on.

In 2019, nearly 300 students attended a GU club debate on taxation, featuring a balanced panel – two in favor of more taxes, two in favor of less taxes. At the end of the event, 82% of students who attended said the arguments presented were ones they had “never heard before on a college campus.” How could that be? Isn’t college exactly the place where all points of view are heard, examined and discussed?

This Earth Week, it’s a tale of two events at Gonzaga University. One features activism, while the other was about intellectual diversity and honesty. Kudos to the students who led the charge for the latter.

Chris Cargill is the Eastern Washington director for Washington Policy Center, an independent research organization with offices in Spokane, Seattle, Olympia and the Tri-Cities. Online at washingtonpolicy.org.