MBA Educators Have A Huge New Tool In The Fight Against Climate Change

Columbia Business School’s Bruce Usher

A fresh initiative from Columbia Business School is boosting the pace at which educators can take on the challenge of climate change.

Designed as a collaborative tool, the Open Climate Curriculum aims to expedite the mission of addressing climate change, because educators now have unprecedented access to an ever-growing content database. Currently, materials come from such business schools as Harvard, MIT, Wharton, NYU Stern, Duke, and Berkeley Haas, among others, and are open to educators — faculty or staff — worldwide.

“Many schools have reached out to me at this point which is terrific, and plan to start reaching out to more schools next year — particularly schools outside of the U.S.,” says Bruce Usher, professor of professional practice and the Elizabeth B. Strickler ’86 and Mark T. Gallogly ’86 faculty director of Columbia’s Tamer Center for Social Enterprise.

THE TIME TO SHARE IS NOW

Why this tool, and why now? The answer won’t come as a shock.

“The issues around climate change and business are shifting rapidly. There’s a time limit here,” says Usher. “If we share materials and cooperate with each other, it will all go a little faster.”

Usher and the team officially announced the platform during the COP28 conference in Dubai earlier this month. The platform has built-in translation, because materials will be shared internationally; Usher says he was pleased to get feedback that the translation tool worked quite well.

“Traditionally, faculty do not share curriculum and materials, but what I’ve found is that faculty teaching climate change are very willing to share,” he says. “I’ve been asked, ‘Why is that?’ My belief is that people who teach climate change are mission-driven.”

“We all develop teaching materials,” he continues. “Over time we improve ours, others improve theirs, but climate change is an unusual topic, because there’s an urgency to teaching it. We have a limited amount of time to educate students, to get them out of the workforce so they can help tackle the issue. The faster we teach them, the faster they get to work on this, the better chance we have of addressing climate change.”

NOTHING BUT GOOD THINGS TO SAY

Usher has a few goals in mind for the future of the platform. “What I hope is that this truly leads to a couple of things. One is a true global sharing of teaching material on climate change, two is open access, and three is – we have to step back, why are we doing this?

Typically in academia, it’s quite common to see a good amount of criticism with ideas like these and opinions, he says, but Usher hasn’t seen this so far.

“I’ve gotten a really positive response. It’s actually unbelievable. Every faculty member I have spoken to at every school all over the world has the same answer – ‘happy to share.’”