THE MORE THEY TALK ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY, THE LESS SUSTAINABLE THEIR ECONOMIC MODELS ARE: The Campus Sustainability Movement: A Threat to the Marketplace of Ideas.

The roughly 60 professors, administrators, and students who attended the event were asked to brainstorm ideas and provide the Council and its working groups with a starting point as drafting of the plan begins (it will be finalized in 2017). For some campus affiliates, alumni, and taxpayers, the proposals may seem alarming. More on them later.

Although “sustainability” is an innocuous-sounding term, perhaps conjuring images of community gardens or recycling, at its core is a totalitarian philosophy that seeks to curtail personal and economic freedom. That’s one of the takeaways from the National Association of Scholars’s comprehensive 2015 report Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism. Across the country, campus activists are shutting down debate on important issues such as climate change, watering down liberal arts curricula with fluffy, politicized courses, and forcing behavioral changes on the part of students.

Each year, according to the NAS report, universities spend approximately $3.4 billion on sustainability initiatives. That’s in addition to the billions in higher education grants provided in the last two decades by government agencies (such as the Environmental Protection Agency) and private philanthropists. Today there are more than 1,200 degree programs—and thousands of courses—related to sustainability. Support for the movement, as evidenced by funding, research, student involvement, administrative growth, and course integration, is at an all-time high.

All funded, ultimately, by lifetimes of student debt. How sustainable is that?