It is time elite universities thanked the oil executives who graciously bought them

This is, of course, a fundamentally backwards reading of the situation. Trump is not attacking the Ivy League because it was corrupted by corporate petroleum money. He is attacking it because the universities have done a remarkably poor job of demonstrating their gratitude to the people who bought them.

If you allow ExxonMobil to underwrite your entire Department of Earth Sciences, the very least you can do is have the decency to produce a few peer-reviewed papers concluding that atmospheric carbon is actually quite good for the global strawberry harvest. Instead, these ungrateful institutions take the petroleum checks to build pristine, LEED-certified sustainability centers, and then fill those centers with researchers who publish models about the impending collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. It is incredibly rude.

Let us look at the history that this study so breathlessly condemns. In the 1970s, when the energy crisis first threatened the American way of life, it was the petroleum giants who stepped in to fund university economics departments, thoughtfully ensuring that an entire generation of scholars would discover that environmental regulation was a drag on the free market. That is not a scandal; that is a service. They provided a much-needed counterbalance to reality.

We need to be adults about the transition. The future is not going to fund itself. If you want a state-of-the-art climate modeling supercomputer, you need to accept that it will be paid for by people who are actively trying to ensure the models come true.

Sterling is entirely correct, of course. When I last spoke with him at a closed-door faculty club dinner, he patiently explained that without fossil fuel money, his department would be forced to rely on federal grants, which require endless paperwork and occasionally mandate that the research benefit the public. By partnering directly with the people causing the crisis, academia eliminates the middleman.

Yet the students refuse to see this pragmatic elegance. Every spring semester, a new batch of undergraduates chains themselves to an administration building, demanding total divestment from the very corporations that pay for the campus wifi. These children—clad entirely in petroleum-derived synthetic fleece—believe that a university endowment can somehow be grown to $40 billion through bake sales and good vibes. We are out of time, but go off.

Let us consider the plight of the modern university chancellor. They are hired to be the public face of an enlightenment institution, yet their actual job is entirely indistinguishable from that of a mid-level fundraiser for a political action committee. They must fly to Houston, sit in a windowless boardroom, and convince a table of petro-chemical executives that their sociology department poses no material threat to the quarterly earnings report. When the chancellor succeeds, they are rewarded with a new biochemistry wing. When they fail, Donald Trump goes on television and threatens to tax their endowment. The new study frames this dynamic as a tragic loss of academic independence. I frame it as a stunning failure of corporate compliance.

I recently leafed through a major Big Oil annual report that dedicated forty pages to its educational partnerships. It was a masterclass in civic duty. They aren't just funding research; they are actively shaping the curriculum to ensure that the next generation of climate scientists understands the absolute economic necessity of doing absolutely nothing. By embedding corporate executives on university boards, the petroleum industry has graciously volunteered to save academia from the burden of independent thought.

It is a beautiful sentiment, and one that the authors of this new study entirely dismiss. They look at fifty years of fossil fuel companies successfully capturing the intellectual output of our most prestigious universities and call it a crisis of integrity. I call it the most successful public-private partnership of the twentieth century.

When a university president cowers before a congressional committee, apologizing for the ideological drift of their campus, they are entirely missing the point. The politicians grilling them are fully funded by the exact same petroleum money that built the university's laboratories. It is a family dispute between wholly-owned subsidiaries of the hydrocarbon industry.

The earth is rapidly approaching a genuine crisis, and we desperately need our brightest minds focused on finding solutions. And who better to direct that focus than the very board members who know exactly which solutions will threaten their quarterly dividends, and can quickly defund them?

If academia wants to survive the next political administration, it is time for university leadership to stop apologizing for their oil money, get down on their knees, and thank the shareholders who allow them to exist.