This Class Brought to You by Exxon

For years, the Harvard Kennedy School’s flagship policy design course has asked students to write a plan to resume offshore drilling after the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010, in which a British Petroleum rig spewed four million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. This past fall, one student noted the economic and environmental risks posed by the continued recklessness of the fossil fuel industry and instead suggested that the moratorium be extended.

Their professor was more concerned that they hadn’t followed the prompt.

The professor’s response was unsurprising to me. As an HKS student, I am accustomed to a classroom experience that reflects the influence of the fossil fuel industry on campus. Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard recently brought the scale of this influence to light in a report (which I helped to write) that documented how oil and gas companies fund research and programming at multiple Harvard schools and lure faculty members to board seats and consulting projects.

For example: BP has funded the aforementioned professor’s research.

HKS is awash in fossil fuel money. HKS has touted taking over $1 million from Shell. The two research centers that house most of the school’s climate work — the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government — are endowed by fossil fuel fortunes. The Harvard Environmental Economics Program is funded by both BP and Shell. The Corporate Responsibility Initiative is funded by ExxonMobil and Chevron.

This influence shapes the intellectual life of the school. I had one classmate who attended a lecture by a well-known professor with both consulting and funding ties to the fossil fuel industry. When this student mentioned the climate impact of the growth of natural gas over the last decade and a half, the professor shut down the comment and dismissed them as a mere ideologue.

Situations like this are part of a longstanding trend of the industry trying to capture academia in order to shape public opinion and serve its bottom line. An industry playbook on this strategy reads: “A regulated firm or industry should be prepared whenever possible to coopt [the] experts” by “hiring them as consultants or advisors, or giving them research grants and the like,” noting that the “experts themselves must not recognize that they have lost their objectivity and freedom of action.”

I want to be clear: The point here is not to pillory any individual actor. For better or worse, fossil fuel companies have been the engine of the global economy for decades. The Kennedy School both cannot and should not blacklist community members with ties to the industry in an attempt at purity. The point is to illustrate the continued reach of the industry’s influence and the necessity of taking what steps we can to limit it.

The administration’s response to this criticism might be that the Kennedy School prizes engagement with the world — one of the school’s taglines — over an attempt at moral purity. To which my question would be: Engagement with whom, exactly?

Who gets engaged in the classroom, and who doesn’t? One of my professors, who received a multi-million dollar grant from BP, mocked the idea of protesting new fossil fuel infrastructure. That’s only laughable because, while BP can buy their way in the door, the Indigenous nations who have their treaty rights violated by unwanted pipelines get frozen out of the halls of power.

We will not be engaging with the African migrants who flee their homelands only to huddle in prison camps on the fringes of Europe, or the Guatemalan farmers who see their yields collapse in the face of unrelenting heat and drought, or even the Gulf Coast fishermen who will never see their livelihoods recover as the oceans now turn to acid in the aftermath of BP’s crimes.

As long as we continue to have a model of engagement in which we allow money to talk, we’ll only be engaging with the people who carry enough untapped carbon on their balance sheets to turn our planet into hell.

Let’s be honest about what the stakes are here. The fossil fuel industry has known about the scale of the crisis, in apocalyptic detail, for more than four decades. Instead of taking steps to address the crisis, industry leaders purchased influence in government, academia, and the media in order to lie, confuse, and delay. Now, as we stand on the brink of the utter destabilization of life on our planet, they continue their time-tested strategies.

At this point, the climate crisis is personal for so many of us. In just the last year, I’ve learned what it feels like to be too hot to think in the midst of an unprecedented heat wave. I’ve choked on wildfire smoke mixed with the rotting stench of a dying river. I’ve seen my sacred mountains go up in flames as my ancestral homelands on two different continents were destroyed by the floods and mudslides of an increasingly hostile planet.

So as a student at the Kennedy School, I cannot help but feel that we are failing to do all we can to face the climate crisis. As both President Lawrence S. Bacow and HKS Dean Doug W. Elmendorf noted in emails last semester, Harvard’s biggest impact comes through its research and teaching. For too long, that research has been up for sale, and found eager buyers in the fossil fuel industry. It’s time to say: no more.

John J. Verghese is a first-year Master’s in Public Policy student at the Harvard Kennedy School.