Academic Activism and the Climate Crisis

This paper aims to conceptualize and to help evaluate political actions by academics as academics. It examines philosophically how the onset of climate crisis and the apparent failure of governments to address it—even in affluent representative democratic states—reconfigures the relation between science and politics, and affects the role and self-conception of scientists and scholars. Does the failure to effectively address climate change show that the self-understanding of the disengaged academic has become untenable, and that we must act politically as academics to prevent climate breakdown? Or is political action a problematic instrumentalization of our academic status—one that compromises the objectivity of the scientist, feeds polarization, and undermines efforts of public education?