How Committed Are Australian Universities to Environmental Sustainability? A Perspective on and from the University of Melbourne

Drawing upon our experiences at the University of Melbourne, we examine the issue of how environmentally sustainable that university and other Australian universities are in an era increasingly impacted by anthropogenic climate change. We argue that while indeed the University of Melbourne has embarked upon a variety of activities and programs that exhibit some commitment to the notion of environmental sustainability, it continues to engage in practices that are not sustainable, the most glaring of which is ongoing investments in fossil fuels. We argue that, like other universities in Australia and around the world, it needs to not only financially divest from environmentally damaging practices but review some of the fundamental institutional logics that universities have adopted since industrialization, and more intensively since the burgeoning of the combined forces of globalization and neoliberalism under which governments have reduced financial support for universities.