Public University Requires Climate-change Course for Graduation

A California university debuted a new graduation requirement for its students during the fall term this year. All students at UC San Diego must now take a course on climate change in order to graduate.

The new “Jane Teranes Climate Change Education Requirement” seeks to “ensure that undergraduates across all majors on campus are equipped to understand and address climate change.” Regardless of students’ ultimate choice for a major — be it Sociology, Linguistics or even Real estate development, all majors offered by UC-San Diego — they must learn climate ideology for at least one semester at the university.

First of Its Kind

The new requirement will affect approximately 7,000 incoming freshman this year. The university boasts that the new requirement is “the first of its kind at a major public university and the first within the University of California system,” according to a university press release.

“UC San Diego has a long history of leadership in climate research and education, and the Jane Teranes Climate Change Education Requirement marks a new path forward,” said Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla. “Whether undergraduates are majoring in STEM, the humanities, arts, social sciences or any other field, this requirement will equip them with a strong understanding of climate change and how they can contribute to meaningful solutions.”

The list of new classes includes “Geoarchaeology in Theory and Practice,” “Literature & the Environment,” and “Gender and Climate Justice.” Interestingly, none of the courses covers how to spot scientific fraud.

DEI Roots

The school’s DEI requirement inspired the new climate-change prerequisite. The DEI requirement mandated that all students take and pass at least one class designed to “critically engage students with topics on race, power, and anti-racist efforts that meaningfully challenge structural racism.”

“We took the best learnings from the DEI requirement … ensuring that the requirement does not add additional time to degree for students,” said Muir College Provost Wayne Yang. “The climate requirement incentivizes and encourages faculty to integrate climate change education into their upper division courses, and thus deepens the curriculum by focusing on what students can actually do about climate change from their disciplines. Importantly, it treats climate change as an interdisciplinary issue.”

“Hypothetically, we could envision that engineering students might want to take a course in their major that lets them think about how to build sustainable widgets, while political science students might seek courses in their major that explore policy implications related to sustainability,” said Sarah Gille, an oceanographer who helped work on the new requirement. “Other students might want to take courses outside their major for a broader view of the world.”

Already Bearing Fruit

Some students are already buying into the climate propaganda.

“It’s really opening my eyes to a lot of what’s going on right now, especially with Hurricane Milton, and why it’s so devastating,” Marcello Ametrano, a communications major, told The Guardian. “The ocean is kind of saving us from it being so much worse, because it absorbs so much carbon dioxide. So it’s really important to understand the ocean because it directly relates to climate change and essentially what’s going on right now in Florida.”

Proponents of the new requirement hope to roll it out for the entire University of California system.