When the University of Toronto’s School of the Environment announced in October that it will no longer accept donations from the fossil fuel industry, the news sent waves through the growing movement to get coal, oil and gas companies off campuses. Among other things, that means banning fossil fuel corporations from financing academic research.
“This victory shows students have the ability to enact institutional change,” said Erin Mackey, a leader of the group Climate Justice UofT, which pushed for the fossil fuel money ban. “That’s especially important when, at many universities, students who want to make change are having the door slammed in their faces.”
Climate Justice UofT grew out of the fossil fuel divestment movement that over the last decade has swept across universities around the world. In 2021, after years of student pressure, University of Toronto agreed to divest its $4 billion endowment by 2030. Soon after that, Climate Justice UofT joined the nascent fossil free research movement that was already taking root in the United States and United Kingdom, helping bring it to Canada.
Yet, even as students built a powerful movement to get fossil fuels off campus, universities on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border have cracked down on dissent. With the election of Donald Trump to another term of the presidency, this tendency to stifle student voices is only likely to grow worse. In this context, the win at University of Toronto is about much more than a single Canadian college.
Right after news broke of the victory, Mackey said, “I was flooded with dozens of messages, mostly from students in the U.S. who were eager to learn how we did it. That shows there’s still a real appetite for change.”
Student dissent under fire
The fossil free research movement formally launched in 2022, when over 500 U.S. and U.K. academics released a letter calling on higher education to stop accepting money from coal, oil and gas companies. The goal is to reduce polluting industries’ presence on campuses, while preventing the companies who are most responsible for climate change from exerting undue influence over research that informs the world’s response to the crisis.
“No one claims researchers are cooking the books or making up findings,” said Lynne Archibald, a Princeton alum who is part of the campaign to get the Ivy League school to ban fossil fuel money. “But bias in research begins far before that point. It involves what questions you ask — you aren’t going to ask them if it’s going to make your funder angry.”
Most fossil free research campaigns are at schools that have already pledged to divest their endowments from at least some coal, oil and gas companies. Now, students want universities to take the next step by further dissociating from the industry. However, the very success of divestment and other student-led movements has provoked a backlash from administrations.
An obvious example of this is universities cracking down on protests against Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Last spring, over 3,000 pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested on U.S. campuses, sometimes by police in riot gear. While not directly related to climate change, many pro-Palestine groups who are calling on universities to divest from Israel have found eager allies in the fossil fuel divestment movement.
Meanwhile, U.S. higher education is under fire from Republican politicians for teaching critical race theory and other social justice concepts. In some red states, Republican leaders have appointed conservative presidents to lead state universities in ways that align with party values. All this has contributed to an apparent unwillingness on the part of higher education institutions to tolerate student dissent.
“Last spring’s upheavals over Palestine left a lot of administrations on edge,” said Archibald. “They’ve gotten to where they just don’t want to deal with any kind of controversy.”
Princeton is unusual in that the climate movement on its campus has pursued fossil fuel divestment and dissociation concurrently. Largely, this was in response to a university policy dating from the ‘80s, which states the two actions must go together.
“The administration decided to link divestment and dissociation during the movement against South African apartheid, arguably to make divestment seem more difficult,” Archibald said. “Of course, there’s a certain intellectual coherence to saying if an industry’s so terrible you won’t invest in it, then you shouldn’t be partnering or accepting money from it, either. Yet until recently, no one envisioned there being an entire industry we would have to divest from.”
Disentangling completely from the fossil fuel industry is a much bigger job than dissociating from the relatively short lists of companies targeted by earlier divestment campaigns. However, when the fossil free research movement began calling on universities to go beyond divestment, it seemed Princeton’s approach might have backfired in activists’ favor.
In September 2022, Princeton responded to years of student activism by announcing it would both divest from publicly traded fossil fuel companies, and ban research partnerships with 90 companies involved in coal and tar sands mining. This was at a time when climate action in the U.S. was at a zenith. The Inflation Reduction Act with its groundbreaking climate legislation had just been passed by Congress, and investors were pouring unprecedented amounts of money into clean energy.
Against that backdrop, Princeton’s new policy represented the biggest victory yet for the fossil free research movement in North America. Unfortunately, it was short lived.
This October, barely two years after its divestment and dissociation announcement, Princeton said it would again accept donations from companies previously excluded under its dissociation policy, effectively backtracking on its fossil free research commitment. The move is part of the broader trend toward colleges dismissing students’ calls for change in a polarized political environment.
“Was the administration here trying to protect itself, in anticipation of a second Trump presidency?” Archibald said. “Elite universities are already disliked by Trump and his allies, and we were ahead of the game in terms of ending fossil fuel funded research. Reversing on something like that makes you less of a political target.”
Princeton’s abandonment of its fossil free research pledge may foreshadow headwinds campus activism are likely to encounter under a second Trump administration. At the same time, the movement to get climate-destroying industries off campus is becoming more organized than ever, proving victories are still possible.
Curbing industry influence
Around the time University of Toronto announced it would divest its endowment from fossil fuels, Erin Mackey was taking a class on American studies.
“I was assigned a couple readings about the influence of the fossil fuel industry on higher education in American universities, which is how I learned about the fossil free research movement,” Mackey said. “I assumed those sorts of influences don’t end at the border, but must extend into Canada.”
To Mackey’s surprise, there wasn’t much published information about fossil fuel money in Canadian academia, but she found the actions of U.S. students calling for fossil free research inspiring. “It got me thinking about the role of universities in enabling the climate crisis, and how divestment is an amazing win but addresses just one of the ways colleges are tied to the fossil fuel industry.”
Mackey and other Climate Justice UofT leaders decided to launch a fossil free research campaign, possibly the first in Canada. They joined organizing calls with a network of students across the U.S. and U.K. then known as Fossil Free Research, who were exchanging ideas and experiences as they built their own campaigns.
“We did teach-ins, rallies and banner drops,” Mackey said. In 2023, she and other students from Climate Justice UofT released a report finding that between 2008 and 2018, the university accepted over $64 million from the fossil fuel industry.
The students also began direct talks with faculty about a fossil free research policy specific to the School of the Environment. Responses from faculty members were generally supportive.
“There were moments of tension,” Mackey said. For example, students initially wanted a fossil free money ban to include banks that are major fossil industry funders. “We didn’t win that one. But overall, it was a good example of students and faculty working together to compel their university to act. We wouldn’t have gotten where we are without the support of faculty, and I don’t think they would have moved forward without students taking the initiative.”
In October, the School of the Environment announced it will no longer accept donations from or “enter into agreements for sponsorship” with fossil fuel companies. Just weeks earlier, Princeton had reneged on its fossil free research commitment, making the new ban at University of Toronto the strongest such policy anywhere on the continent.
Mackey recently graduated from UofT, but is still closely connected with the student climate movement there. “It was a big win,” she said of the School of the Environment announcement. “As a movement, it’s important we celebrate milestones like this because they show how organizing can and does work.”
A campus-based resistance movement
So far, universities in Canada have not faced the same level of political pressure to quash dissent as those in the U.S. However, the crackdown in higher education is not limited to south of the border.
In June, police fired tear gas on pro-Palestine protesters at McGill University in Quebec. At other Canadian universities, student encampments calling for schools to divest from Israel have been forcibly dispersed. In this atmosphere, the fossil free research victory at University of Toronto appears to be an especially important win for student protest. Meanwhile, at other schools in Canada and the U.S., students are pushing back against administrations resistant to change.
“We’re letting students, faculty and alumni know Princeton walked back its fossil free research commitments,” Archibald said. “Today, no one in higher education would consider letting tobacco companies fund a study on lung cancer — but that’s basically the equivalent of what Princeton is doing.”
At an international level, Fossil Free Research has changed its name to the Campus Climate Network to reflect a broadened focus on cutting ties with fossil fuels at every level. It now serves as an organizing hub for students involved in divestment campaigns, fossil fuel dissociation, decarbonizing campuses and more.
Students pushing to divest and dissociate from coal, oil and gas have also found valuable new allies by connecting with supportive alumni.
“At Princeton, it started with a couple young alums who were interested in divestment and started working with students,” said Archibald, who graduated in 1987. “Then the pandemic happened, and suddenly all the group’s organizing went online. It meant any student, faculty member or alum could participate from anywhere in the country. Even if you left Princeton 50 years ago, you could get involved.”
Back at the University of Toronto, Climate Justice UofT is building on momentum from its recent win.
“A lot of members are now involved in pushing for divestment from Israeli apartheid,” Mackey said. “And, we’re working to get the whole university to follow the School of the Environment’s example with a university-wide fossil free research policy. Institutions are movable until they’re not — and the progress we’ve made so far shows the strength of student organizing.”
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