Governing academic flying in the neoliberal university

There is an emerging discussion in at least parts of academia about the environmental impact of universities. While academics have long been devoted to studying and teaching issues of sustainability, scholars have started to question how environmentally sustainable universities are in practice. Recent research shows that universities, at least the elite universities of the Global North, tend to be resource-intensive organizations and that a major part of emissions comes from researchers’ air travel. The rather uncomfortable realization of researchers belonging to a hyper-mobile global elite has gained increased attention and given rise to a small but growing research field centered on the term "academic flying". Yet, while previous studies help clarify how much researchers fly and why, few have studied how universities respond and work to reduce flying (if they do so), including how individual researchers navigate and experience these attempts. Moreover, few have placed efforts to reduce academic flying in the wider neoliberal capitalist context in which contemporary universities operate. In this paper, which is part of my doctoral thesis, I examine how universities respond to the growing problematizations of academic flying, using Sweden as my empirical case. Through discourse analysis of policy documents and interviews with individual researchers, and using a governmentality perspective, I find that the governing techniques deployed by Swedish universities to regulate and reduce academic flying build on a self-governing logic. The self-governing logic outsources the responsibility to reduce emissions from travels to individual researchers who are asked to voluntarily monitor and regulate their own emissions. This rationale calls upon researchers’ identities as environmentally conscious, responsible and moral, as opposed to an imagined ignorant, irresponsible, and immoral Other. What is more, the self-governing logic radically clashes with the ideas and demands of being a successful neoliberal academic. While the universities I study highlight sustainability and set up emissions targets for business travels, they emphasize even stronger the need to be globally competitive and increase internationalization. Thus, researchers are caught between two contradictory governmentalities: on the one hand the expectation to become a successful productive, competitive and mobile academic, and on the other hand to take responsibility for and reduce their own emissions. I argue that this contradiction can only be understood within the wider context of the capitalist neoliberal university – and wider society – and that it actualizes questions about what possibilities and limits such a system offers when it comes to actually taking responsibility for the environment.