Protesters disrupted the inauguration, at the end of September, of the multidisciplinary center on the sustainability of the Californian university. Some students and teachers denounce partnerships with the fossil industry.
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Barely inaugurated, already a source of controversy. The new Faculty of Stanford University – The first created by the prestigious Californian university for seventy years – has opened its doors on 1 er September. Its name: the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability (“School of Sustainability”). It is entirely devoted to the planet, climate and solutions to accelerate the energy transition. Its objective is to form a generation of leaders capable of bringing humanity to zero carbon dioxide emission.
The Doerr School could be launched thanks to a donation of $ 1.1 billion (1.13 billion euros), the most important that Stanford received in its history – and the second in a university institution after The donation of 1.8 billion Michael Bloomberg, in 2018, at Johns-Hopkins University, in Baltimore (Maryland). Mécènes: the billionaire John Doerr, one of the historical figures of venture capital in Silicon Valley-ex-engineer at Intel, he was among the first to take shares in Netscape, Compaq, Amazon, Google, then Slack – and his wife, Ann, president of the board of directors of the Khan Academy, the reputation platform for free online teaching.
The investor was interested in new energies when he saw the stir of his 16-year-old daughter before the documentary of the former American vice-president Al Gore, released in 2006, a disturbed truth, -Ali said during the school inauguration on September 29. “Dad, your generation has created this problem. You better solve it,” she said. According to the patron, “the climate will be the new computer science. What young people want to devote their lives”.
Coalition of opponents
It is Arun Majumdar who takes on the role of dean of the new faculty. This mechanical engineering teacher is senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Conservative think tank of Stanford, whose working group and climate work. On September 29, when he was about to speak in front of some 600 guests, a hundred demonstrators disrupted the ceremony. Since the project was announced, in May, it has been the subject of criticism from students, teachers and scientists, gathered in a group called Coalition for a True School of Sustainability (” Coalition for a real school of sustainability “). They ask that the Doerr School is committed to refusing subsidies from the fossil industry. They believe that the institution loses credibility by accepting them, especially since it is richly endowed – in addition to the donation of the Doerr couple, other contributions have brought the total of the faculty resources to $ 1.69 billion .
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