Abstract

The university has a crucial role to play in producing environmentally informed, democratically active graduates and could well re-form around this issue. Although there are currently many calls to re-shape the university, few of these take climate change as their starting point. This paper argues that failing to ‘speak the environment in’ to all academic conversations may be ultimately at the expense of the future of the academy itself. It discusses some of the environmental limitations of existing policies, programmes, and profiles in universities in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It considers these limitations together with the concerns of those who seek non-environmental university reform, concluding that global warming gives the strategic focus missing in these debates.