Responding to decades of failure & inaction from governments despite ever starker warnings, academics are increasingly joining peaceful civil disobedience movements, the necessity which is set out by Dr Charlie Gardner & Dr. Claire Wordley 3/n

nature.com/articles/s4155…

Over a thousand scientists have now signed a declaration organised by ScientistsForXR pledging their support for non-violent direct-action movements such as Extinction Rebellion Global and Fridays For Future to drive political action 4/n

reuters.com/article/us-cli…

However, whilst they may want to support such movements many academics can perceive barriers to joining them e.g. fear of dismissal, competing time pressures, social stigma within academia. In this paper we argue that universities should work to remove those barriers 5/n

Thousands of universities and further education colleges having issued ‘Climate Emergency’ declarations, which focus on embedding sustainability through their research, teaching and their own institutional footprints. EAUC Second Nature UN Environment Programme 6/n

unep.org/news-and-stori…

Whilst important, we argue that due to the unprecedented scale & urgency of the threat such initiatives will be insufficient to catalyse the required transformations in our societies &economies because of (i) the time lags inherent in education & research pathways to impact 7/n

And (ii) their failure to address either real-world political processes or the forces invested in maintaining the status quo. Something that we believe civil disobedience movements are best placed to do 8/n

In the paper we propose a number of actions that universities should adopt to facilitate academics move from publications to public actions 9/n

Briefly, these include explicitly recognising advocacy as part of the work mandate of academics by altering work allocation models, facilitating engaged research sabbaticals, altering hiring& promotion policies, & providing training to enhance the effectiveness of engagement 10/n

In addition, universities must defend the right of academics to engage in protest and push back against emerging threats to academic freedom. Such actions would strengthen a rich tradition of academic protest 11/n

As Prof. Amanda Power of TORCH Oxford argues universities “should now be asking whether we still believe that the best thinking for the twenty-first century is really done at a remove from profound personal investment in a liveable future” 12/n

torch.ox.ac.uk/article/the-fu…

Please check out our paper if you want to read the details of what we propose and also the other excellent papers in this special issue edited by Victoria Hurth and Iain stewart on 'Re-Purposing Universities for Sustainable Human Progress' 13/n

frontiersin.org/research-topic…