Sustainability as an emerging mandate in higher education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Universities worldwide have recently made commitments to advancing sustainability and sustainable development. However, much of the literature on higher education for sustainable development (HESD) is practice-oriented or prescriptive. This article seeks to explain how and why universities are framing their sustainability commitments. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with sustainability professionals at 33 universities in 19 countries, we find two overarching discursive rationales for university engagement with sustainability, which also shape their views on sustainability rankings and assessments: 1) sustainability as an internally oriented organising principle that shapes approaches to campus-based activities and 2) sustainability as part of an externally oriented stance, namely a broader international orientation linked to recognition and solving global problems. Drawing on sociological concepts of legitimacy and distinction, we argue that visible commitments to sustainability support universities’ claims to both moral and cognitive legitimacy, and global status, while also opening them up to criticism over authenticity and greenwashing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".