US Higher education and fossil fuels: the limits of liberalism in university climate action

ABSTRACT

US universities have positioned themselves in recent years as sites of progressive green action, cutting-edge research, and student-driven change. These universities have even been exported to wealthy oil-dependent states in the Arabian Peninsula under the guise of developing their societies away from fossil fuels through liberal education. These countries, however, have developed their national strategies within imperial relationships with Great Britain and then the United States, in part to uphold the prosperity of the West and its development of liberal democratic ideologies and institutions, of which higher education has played a central part. Drawing on research within US branch campuses in Qatar, and focusing specifically on Texas A&M Qatar, an engineering school that is a site of what we call ‘petro-education’, we trace how these US universities reproduce the fossil fuel industry’s operations. Bringing this research in conversation with scholarship that challenges the liberal mythologies of US higher education, we argue that US universities largely remain embedded in a broader agenda to reconcile the climate crisis with what appears to be a greener capitalism that extends fossil fuel extraction into the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Universities
• climate justice
• fossil fuels
• engineering
• Qatar

Introduction

US universities have positioned themselves in recent years as sites of progressive climate action, cutting-edge research, and student-driven change. Following the 2019 youth climate strikes, over 7000 educational institutions across the world declared a climate emergency (O’Neil & Sinden, 2021), with many US-based signatories announcing their dedication to internal transformation, ranging from transitioning into carbon neutral campuses (Nelson, 2020) to instituting climate and ecological action-oriented curriculum (Reimers, 2021). College campuses are also sites of struggle and student mobilisation, such as the movement for divestment from the fossil fuel industry (Belliveau et al., 2021; OHealy & Debski, 2017). Embedded in these various university-based activities is the belief that US higher education – rooted in principles of liberalism – is uniquely situated to produce the critical citizens and knowledge needed to tackle the climate crisis.

Even as higher education institutions across the United States increasingly incorporate climate and environmental justice discourses, they largely remain structurally embedded in a broader agenda to reconcile the worst consequences of the climate crisis – an unlivable planet – with ‘greener’ development models that delay transition away from fossil fuels (Buck, 2021; Li et al., 2022). In this paper, we argue that the limitations of US universities to adequately respond to climate change are rooted in contradictions of liberalism, which co-produce an intimate relationship with capital, imperialism, colonisation, racism, and the neoliberal state (Losurdo, 2011; Lowe, 2015; Ranganathan, 2016) – the very processes, logics, and institutions that are responsible for the climate crisis, its acceleration, and uneven ecological harm and impacts (Ajl, 2021; Belcher et al., 2020; Curley & Lister, 2020a; Huber, 2013; Moore, 2015; Perry, 2021; Taíwo, 2022; Tilley et al., 2022; Whyte, 2020). Framed as products of liberal progressive values, greening discourses and climate actions on university campuses are in fact often mobilised to greenwash the oil and gas industry and even expand the capitalist mode of production that is entangled with imperial geopolitical relationships and based in hydrocarbon extraction.

This paper provides a grounded analysis of the contradictions that animate liberalism, higher education, and climate justice by examining US university partnerships with ‘oil and gas-dependent’ states in the Arabian Peninsula over the past two decades, often legitimised as knowledge transfer projects that will develop these societies away from fossil fuels (Günel, 2019; Rottleb & Kleibert, 2022; Vora, 2018). At the supposed meeting ground of liberal and illiberal, petro-wealth and environmental awareness, these institutions offer concrete examples of how campus greening practices and sustainability rhetoric appealing to climate action, rather than challenging existing geopolitical structures of ‘carbon democracy’, are in fact part of a longstanding set of global entanglements that rely upon and expand fossil fuel extraction (Mitchell, 2011) and regional circuits of capital accumulation (Hanieh, 2018).

Drawing on our separate research experiences in US branch campuses in Education City in Qatar, and especially 18 months of ethnographic and archival research conducted by Danya between 2018 and 2020, we focus on Texas A&M University at Qatar (hereafter referred to as TAMUQ), an engineering campus founded in 2003.¹ We approach TAMUQ as a case study to examine what we call ‘petro-education’, a mode of training and socialisation that channels and appropriates student desires for and questions regarding alternatives to fossil fuels toward the oil and gas industry (Al-Saleh, 2021). Relying on liberal tenets, such as freedom of inquiry and the plurality of ideas, along with notions of life-long learning and individual hard-work, petro-education naturalises an unquestionable future for fossil fuels and produces industry workers. Through petro-education, US educational partnerships such as TAMUQ, increasingly touting green research agendas paired with liberal arts education, reproduce the economic power of the fossil fuel industry, along with the labour hierarchies and global inequalities on which it depends. Instead of their purported goals of moving Gulf economies away from oil and gas dependence, then, the knowledge and subjects produced in these spaces of globalised US higher education extend longstanding clientalist relationships between the Gulf and US institutions. Petro-education within this international partnership provides crucial insight regarding how US-based universities work more broadly to discursively distance themselves from fossil fuels while materially expanding the exploitative and extractive relationships upon which the US university – and liberalism itself – have been founded.

Contradictions of liberalism

In order to understand the logics behind a project like Texas A&M University at Qatar and its role in ongoing imperial entanglements between the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, it is necessary to unpack certain persistent mythologies of liberal education. US universities narrate themselves as rooted in classic tenets of liberal philosophy, such as individual freedom, open exchange of ideas, pluralism, and egalitarianism. More recently, human rights, diversity, and climate justice have also been incorporated into the US university’s story about itself. Liberal ideology is underpinned by the mythology of progress, a teleological understanding of history that both diminishes the historical violence of slavery and colonialism by claiming to have moved beyond past injustices and narrates present-day examples of liberalism’s failures as exceptions to a worldview that is rooted in a humanist desire to produce individual freedoms and equality.

Liberalism’s power requires a constant referencing to peoples and places that have not progressed, that remain stuck in the past or contain within them ideologies that are fundamentally not good; the illiberal and the liberal are mutually constituted through the ways that Western institutions, like universities, present themselves. And the Gulf monarchies have become liberalism’s quintessential other – places that are represented as overly traditional, authoritarian, patriarchal, and violators of human rights in much scholarly and popular discourse. Recent media coverage of the 2022 Qatar World Cup that described migrant worker conditions as ‘modern-day slavery’ provides a glimpse into these representations of the Gulf, which often reproduce the idea of a morally superior West (Babar & Vora, 2022; Kanna et al., 2020), in the process eliding how labour exploitation is a transnational project of racial capitalism that is rooted in part in actual slavery, whose most extreme violences were perpetuated by the West itself and from whose legacies international financial institutions continue to profit. The branch campus, within this ideological mapping of the world, has become a flashpoint of concern for US-based critics, who claim that moving liberal education into these illiberal spaces puts liberalism itself in crisis. As we have argued elsewhere, such critiques are rooted more in romantic attachments to the idea of liberalism than in the realities of higher education both in the US and the Gulf (Al-Saleh & Vora, 2020; Singh & Vora, 2023; Vora & Al-Saleh, 2021).

Even scholarship that critiques contradictions of the US university, such as the field that has come to be known as critical university studies, often perpetuates nostalgic notions of liberal education. Much US critical university studies relies, for example, upon a periodisation of higher education in which universities once served the public good and now have gone off course (Boggs & Mitchell, 2018). In this historicisation, the GI bill and the post-World War II growth of land grant public universities exemplify a past that has been corrupted by neoliberalisation (Gusterson, 2017; Newfield, 2008), which often includes the profit-driven globalisation of universities into illiberal contexts. Ultimately, this type of narrative preserves a faith in the goodness of liberalism and of the positive role of US universities in addressing global problems, like that of climate change, as ‘the only social institutions devoted to helping the rising generation … acquire personal capabilities that will renew themselves throughout their lives’ (Newfield, 2016).

In contrast to this narration, several scholars have pointed out how the university – and liberalism itself – is rooted in and continues the violences of slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism, and the carceral state (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014). This work exposes how elite colonial colleges (many now known as part of the Ivy League) developed systems of thought that justified and reproduced slavery and genocide, while simultaneously framed as bastions of liberalism (Wilder, 2013). Land grant universities, often narrated as democratic institutions for mass uplift and middle-class mobility, were enabled through theft of Indigenous land and were tools of manifest destiny, producing knowledge to extract profit from land and further colonial expansion, through disciplines like agricultural science, engineering, and military science (Ahtone & Lee, 2020, 2021; Curley & Smith, 2020b; Koch, 2023; la paperson, 2017; Stein, 2020). Many of these campuses were racially segregated and denied entry to women for most of their histories, as in the case of Texas A&M, which remained a military college for white men until the mid-1960s. By taking these histories seriously, we can see how the university has always been a site of exclusion and inequality, even as it produces experiences of free intellectual exchange and democracy for some – the ‘public’ of the university’s public good is fundamentally white, propertied, male, Christian, and settler, defined against those excluded from that community of the ‘free’.

While US universities claim to have corrected their prior exclusions, the knowledge and subjects produced within these spaces in the service of imperialism continue to shape our present (Boggs et al., 2019), including in the form of climate and environmental injustice. The development of racial science, for example, justified slavery and indenture, manifest destiny, native eradication, and the immense climate impacts of terraformation and resource extraction that ‘civilized’ the Americas from the sixteenth to ninteenth centuries. Several scholars trace the origins of the ‘Anthropocene’, the proposed geological era that we are in today due to human impact, to the early colonial period, and have explored the irony of the concept, which rests upon a definition of the human that did not for centuries include nonwhite peoples and places; these peoples and places, despite producing less carbon emissions than the Global North, are the very places that are now blamed as some of the worst contributors to climate change (Davis & Todd, 2017; Yusoff, 2019). Indigenous scholars and organisers have highlighted how environmental destruction was a key tenet of European settler colonialism (Red Nation, 2021; Whyte, 2018), which aimed to ‘civilize’ seemingly wild and unpopulated land into property, a site for the production of surplus value and resource extraction, materially supported through university expertise. Climate scientists have acknowledged that colonialism is a historic and ongoing driver of climate change (IPCC, 2022). As Diné geographers Curley and Lister (2020a) have argued, colonialism has produced conditions of dependency on resource extraction through which ‘Indigenous nations in the US are also among the most vulnerable communities impacted by changing energy landscapes’ (254).

The knowledge produced by US universities also naturalises and continues to justify racialised exposure to war-driven environmental destruction and imperial incursions in more recent history. Scholars have considered US higher education as part of the ‘military-industrial-academic complex’, a concept that maps the evolving network of the tech industry, weapons manufacturers, universities, and Department of Defense institutions that began consolidating after World War II. One example of the activities produced through this complex include nuclear testing and weapons research and development (ICAN, 2019) resulting in the creation of pollution sacrifice zones. US universities also serve as key sites for the development of technology and expertise used in the United States’ never ending ‘War on Terror’, which facilitated the US occupation and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a time when US universities such as Texas A&M were establishing campuses across the Arabian Peninsula.

The US university in the Arabian Peninsula

The mission statements and spectacular spaces of US branch campuses, which anchor Qatar’s Education City project, highlight the need for liberal education to develop skills and subjects that are supposedly lacking in the country and region; these include citizens who are entrepreneurial instead of dependent on social welfare, critical thinking over rote learning, individualism over collective identities, gender equality, and, increasingly, climate awareness. Gulf campuses now tout sustainability initiatives like LEEDS certification, environmental awareness campaigns, and educational offerings around industries and sectors that are not reliant on fossil fuels, like diplomacy, business, and journalism. But despite their claims of bringing liberal ideology to the illiberal Gulf, we argue that these campuses are the most recent iterations of ‘carbon democracy’. As Tim Mitchell (2011) has argued, the story of liberal democracy in the US and Europe is fundamentally a story of carbon democracy: the development of Western liberal societies rested upon imperial relationships that invested in producing authoritarian ‘illiberal’ polities in the Middle East that could both provide easier access to the oil reserves necessary to build the West’s material wealth and serve as the foil to the West’s representation of itself.

Today’s branch campus projects are purported to help move Gulf economies away from petro-reliance and into greener futures – from illiberal to liberal. Yet, current patterns of fossil fuel extraction and development in the Gulf are themselves products in part of the liberal university. Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, US-based oil companies and universities began to collaborate on international education as a strategy to counter anti-colonial movements in the Global South and the nationalisation of oil fields in the Middle East (Beasley, 2018). International students from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Iran were sponsored to study at US universities so that they ‘would venture back home to work loyally for and with Houston-based companies to develop their nation's oil wealth’ (Beasley 2018: 4). During negotiations over Texas A&M’s branch campus in the early 2000s, administrators cited the interests of US-based oil companies as a reason to pursue the campus, and Texan oil executives based in Qatar supported the process (Al-Saleh, 2021). The role of US universities like Texas A&M in supporting the oil and gas industry is not new and is entangled in the production of corporate-endorsed solutions to ecological and economic crises. As Tretter (2020) points out in his work on knowledge production and the oil and gas industry: ‘U.S. public universities played an essential role in producing a considerable amount of knowledge about the gathering and processing of oil’ (99).

By dividing the world into democratic and non-democratic, liberal and illiberal, Western societies appeared to be cleansed of the exploitation and extraction that they rely upon, and this mythology upholds claims that US universities are bastions of progress in the region (Koch & Vora, 2019). Yet, by partnering with Gulf regimes, it is US-based universities and oil companies that profit, benefiting from relaxed labour and environmental laws of the host countries, their investments in large-scale development projects, and their repression of labour organising (Iskander, 2021; Wright 2021). In addition, knowledge that might not be able to be produced in the US due to stricter institutional review oversights, lack of funding, and environmental laws, can be pursued through research based in the Gulf, where industry collaborations receive little scrutiny and technologies can be tested without the ethical challenges they might face in the ‘liberal’ spaces of US-based home institutions (Günel, 2019). Bringing the contradictions of liberal education forward allows us to interrogate how these mythologies are reproduced through international higher education partnerships. In the rest of this paper, we explore how these processes play out on the ground in a place like Education City, and especially at TAMUQ, an extension of a public land grant university in the United States and a source of knowledge production for the Texas (and international) oil industry.

Petro-education in a time of sustainability and climate action

At a 2014 event in College Station about Texas A&M’s ties with the oil and gas industry, a university research director started by stating:

Texas A&M is the great university it is in large part because of the contributions of the oil industry … I would also say that the oil industry has achieved what it has today in large part due to the leadership of many Texas A&M graduates … (George Bush Presidential Library and Museum 2014)

It is not surprising given this relationship that Texas A&M is one of the more successful branch campuses in the Gulf – it provides what we call ‘petro-education’, a mode of training and socialisation that prepares students to enter the industry (Al-Saleh, 2021). Petro-education adopts liberal modes of education, such as plurality of ideas and freedom of inquiry, to displace student concerns regarding fossil fuel futures. Petro-education is reinforced by existing partnerships TAMUQ has with transnational conglomerates, like Shell, which sponsor student education and recruit graduates. These corporations also utilise branch campuses as part of their corporate social responsibility programmes, programmes which claim an investment in green futures while also proliferating labour and knowledge that serve the needs of the oil and gas industry. While Texas A&M’s ties to the industry in Texas and in the Gulf are perhaps easier to track at a public university than at private institutions, its operations are not unique. By addressing the contradictions of liberalism in this institution, we raise critical questions regarding the growing branding of US universities as leaders for climate action.

The establishment of branch campuses in Qatar is part of a broader agenda of knowledge economy development across the Gulf region (Ewers, 2016), where US and other foreign institutions have partnered with Gulf states to design educational institutions, such as Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi (Günel, 2019), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia (Jones, 2015), and Dubai Knowledge Park. ‘Knowledge economy’ indexes a development agenda that aims to diversify Gulf economies by producing new sources of wealth through the export of intellectual property and the development of human capital. The TAMUQ campus, which offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering, is located, along with five other US university campuses, in Education City, a project that represents Qatar’s investment in knowledge economy development. Student populations within Education City are Qatari citizens, immigrant residents, and international students.

While Qatar’s investments in US higher education were not initially attached to climate action, development discourse over the past ten years has increasingly linked knowledge economy infrastructure to sustainability initiatives (Koch, 2018; Luomi et al., 2013). For example, in Qatar’s medium term climate change plan under the Paris Agreement, educational institutions were described as ‘a key player in the steering and implementation of the national long-term climate change strategies’ (Qatar Ministry of Municipality and Environment, 2021, p. 8). TAMUQ was the only foreign university mentioned by name as contributing to climate action in Qatar in this document (2021, p. 10).

Over the past two decades, TAMUQ’s mission has co-evolved with Qatar’s national development agenda to incorporate a focus on environmentalism. Throughout this time, the campus has focused on producing increasing numbers of Qatari engineers as well as research that aligns with industry needs. As sustainability and climate action have integrated into development discourse in the Gulf, TAMUQ’s student body increasingly shares these aspirations and ideas, which are sometimes irreconcilable with the university’s role in serving the oil and gas industry. Students come to study at TAMUQ with myriad concerns about the future: declining oil prices, automation, energy transition, the potential antiquated specialisation of petroleum engineering, and climate change. This has led to difficulties in attracting incoming students to majors such as petroleum engineering, which has become the most consistently under-enrolled major there. Petro-education at TAMUQ, however, has also adapted in order to try to reconcile these contradictions.

Channeling students to petroleum engineering

Not only are many branch campuses in the Gulf funded by profits from oil and gas, but they are also spaces that are designed to produce workers for the oil and gas companies, which constitute the largest proportion of partnerships with Gulf universities, providing generous stipends and internships for students who they expect to employ after graduation. While this is the case for most universities in the Gulf, it is especially pronounced at TAMUQ, which is rooted in providing petro-education to its students.

It is not surprising, then, that TAMUQ staff considered under-enrolment in petroleum engineering a problem. TAMUQ has implemented diverse strategies spanning from interpersonal relationships to admissions in order to channel more students into this field. An employee shared how recent hires of Qatari engineering faculty were helping to attract more students to the field. In 2017 and 2018, TAMUQ hired two Qatari engineering faculty: a petroleum engineer from TAMUQ’s second cohort of students and a chemical engineer who received her PhD from Texas A&M. The staff member mentioned the critical role of the Qatari petroleum engineering faculty’s participation in TAMUQ’s Summer Engineering Academies, a programme for high school students, in inspiring students to study there: ‘he has high energy and attracts students to the field’. As the petroleum engineering faculty member explained after receiving a TAMUQ Alumnus of the Year award:

I am a product of this university, which is why students look up to me because I am just like them. It is a very big responsibility because I always need to do my best and deliver my very best. I do this for the students so in the future, the students can aspire to be someone like me and work just as hard. (MENA FN 2018)

His presence as a potential role model has helped to increase enrolment in the petroleum engineering department by inspiring Qatari students to pursue this career path. The campus promotes the professional success of both these Qatari faculty as examples of what students can achieve with hard work.

The mobilisation of relationships to reach these students extends into other areas. TAMUQ has a strong alumni network, which it calls upon to showcase the careers that graduates have crafted for themselves in the oil and gas industry. The organisation often showcases the success of women in the industry as examples of women’s empowerment. A Palestinian student, Hind, cited these alumni events as reasons she felt comfortable majoring in petroleum engineering, despite her family’s initial concern about her opportunities post-graduation. TAMUQ drew on state-sponsored feminism in Qatar to attract students to the major and touted the large numbers of women studying engineering as signs of their contribution toward liberal progress in Qatar (Al-Saleh, 2022; Vora, 2018). Many of these women, however, struggled securing jobs that matched their educational background in the industry (Amani et al., 2021). This reflected gendered inequalities within the oil and gas industry, as well as at TAMUQ, which had, for example, only two women on the engineering faculty, while the majority were based in the liberal arts programme, responsible for teaching humanities, social sciences, and writing requirements.

Many of the students Danya spoke to during this research had been warned away from the industry by parents and close relatives with work experience in Qatar (usually immigrants). This generation had a sense of what opportunities were available, and based on this information encouraged their children to pursue electrical or mechanical engineering instead. Hind was one of these students. She never applied to study petroleum engineering because of familial advice, but she found herself admitted to TAMUQ, nonetheless. Although admissions told her that she could switch after her first year, she quickly became passionate about the field and close with other students in her cohort. Admissions, combined with interpersonal relationships, worked to channel students like Hind into petroleum engineering during a time of under-enrolment.

Students who were not petroleum engineering majors were directed towards the industry in other ways. Chemical engineering at the branch campus, for instance, is closely tied to the oil and gas industry. A chemical engineering faculty regretfully explained: ‘chemical engineering is treated as though it is the downstream [of the industry]’. He did not see himself as solely interested in the technical problems of the oil and gas industry’s downstream, such as refining crude petroleum and natural gas into usable products. A Bahraini chemical engineering student, who chose the major because he was interested in working in the cosmetics or pharmaceutical industries, was disappointed in how much the curriculum was tailored around fossil fuels. Miriam, a Qatari student, was also dealing with this problem. Interested in the other-than-human life impacted by development in Qatar, she chose chemical engineering because she thought the degree could translate to work addressing environmental destruction caused by the industry. However, the relationship between chemical and petroleum engineering was so close at the campus that chemical engineering faculty were chairing the petroleum engineering department. In this way, even students who assumed chemical engineering would offer them alternative work were being taught areas of chemical engineering that support oil and gas industry operations.

Greening petro-education

Over the last several years, branch campuses across Education City have incorporated ideas about environmental responsibility and sustainability into their programming and research. At TAMUQ, a large area of focus includes efforts to ‘green’ the fossil fuel industry. For instance, a Qatari chemical engineering faculty member actively does work that falls under this umbrella. In a profile of her work, TAMUQ’s magazine described her career pathway:

Before beginning her graduate studies, she met with a professor who advised her to look at [Qatar’s national development agenda, the Qatar National Vision 2030] to see what she could look forward to in the next 30 years … Growing up in the industrial area of Al Khor, she thought maybe she could work to improve quality of life and sustainability in the area. In her research, she has worked in … making use of carbon dioxide given off by plants to make emissions reduction more attractive and profitable. (TAMUQ 2019, 44)

The faculty member herself, positioned as a role model for women students, described her university’s investment in greening fossil fuels: ‘TAMU promotes a culture of environmental responsibility for today and innovative solutions for tomorrow’.

Miriam held opposing ideas of what sustainability in Qatar should look like and criticized TAMUQ for failing to adequately address environmental issues. Miriam was working to organise workshops about environmental degradation in Qatar, along with addressing practices related to consumption at the branch campus itself. She found that staff did not take her seriously, often laughing off her requests. While she initially rankled at a curriculum so closely tied to the oil and gas industry, over time Miriam started to repeat the idea that perhaps she could change things from the inside. In this way, the campus incorporation of sustainability rhetoric worked to redirect student interest toward greening the industry and, in effect, extending fossil fuel dependence into the future. This mismatch between TAMUQ’s increasing adoption of sustainability rhetoric and even climate action with its activities is reflective of broader contemporary trends in US higher education: for example, the University of Texas at Austin promotes itself as a campus sustainability leader in reducing campus emissions, while also leasing university-owned lands in the Permian Basin to oil and gas companies, an action that is not counted in the university's calculation of its emissions (Schechter, 2023). Several prominent universities, which brand themselves as protagonists in climate action, accept research funding that originates in fossil fuel industries (Data for Progress, 2023; see Westervelt, 2023 for how such funding influences curriculum and research).

Petro-education operates as a flexible set of mechanisms to reconcile these contradictions for a student body increasingly concerned about the future of climate change. Basel, a Palestinian chemical engineer who graduated in 2016, continually emphasised that he never intended to work for an oil company. He contextualised his interest in energy transition as the most critical field to pursue as an engineer, saying that climate change is ‘the techno-economic challenge of our time’. After working on various faculty research projects, Basel was encouraged by his mentors to consider graduate studies in chemical engineering with a focus on alternative energy. His father had sudden health issues and Basel realised he would have to look for a well-paying job to support his parents instead. During his senior year, he was called to a TAMUQ dean’s office; Shell Qatar was interested in hiring local non-Qatari TAMUQ engineers to work for them. Adamantly opposed to working for the industry for ethical reasons, Basel initially rejected the offer to interview: ‘I said, no thanks, I don’t want to work for oil and gas. I started talking about solar, wind, blah blah blah … the whole climate change story’. He laughed, recalling how the administrator responded to his refusal: ‘He said, you’re an idiot. You’re not leaving unless you say yes … . So, I said “yes”’. He was offered the job and went to work at the Pearl GTL, the world’s largest gas-to-liquids plant. Over time, he came to believe that he could make the most change through Shell, rather than some ‘tiny start-up company’.

Basel’s initial refusal to work for the oil and gas industry was increasingly common among TAMUQ students. Students like Basel, Hind, and Miriam are admitted to TAMUQ with heterogeneous interests and aspirations. Petro-education worked to reconcile contradictions between sustainability discourses and increasing student concerns regarding climate change with the university’s ties to the oil and gas industry. Incorporating liberal tenets of education – including plurality of ideas, models of individual hard-work, and freedom of choice to switch majors and pursue innovative careers – petro-education is capacious enough to accommodate and redirect their energies. Petro-education extends its reach beyond petroleum engineering to draw students from other majors into the industry or to redirect systemic critiques to the work of greening fossil fuels.

Learning to work: labor hierarchies and the lifelong pursuit of knowledge

TAMUQ’s practices of directing students into the oil and gas industry have their roots in the main campus in Texas. Texas A&M has long attempted to channel students into the US oil industry during periods where the industry appeared to be in decline. Reflecting this, the production of petroleum engineers at Texas A&M’s Petroleum Engineering department on the main campus has been closely tied to ideas about oil as a commodity with naturally recurring ups and downs. Narrating oil markets as cyclical works to displace uncertainty about the future of oil onto the students themselves. It is not oil futures that are uncertain, and therefore a risky career choice, but rather students’ orientations to work – how they adapt to and take advantage of infinite cycles of booms and busts. This approach to student work ethic and self-improvement, coupled with close ties to the oil and gas industry, were characteristics of both the home campus and TAMUQ.

Kelsey, a white US citizen who was studying abroad at TAMUQ, drew on her training at the main campus to assert this cyclical future of fossil fuels. She explained that Texas A&M’s petroleum engineering department was unique in that it regulated admissions according to oil prices. Since oil markets had ups and downs, the need for petroleum engineers went through cycles ‘ … people are commodities, and the department recognizes that demand is not consistent compared with supply’. At the same time, she emphasised that the industry’s boom-to-bust cycle required adventurous people. She had read Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, a sweeping Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the global oil industry, and emphasised the takeaway she gleaned from the text: it was visionary oil men who took on risks as individuals to transform the world. This meant that petroleum engineers, like the oil men who preceded them, must have the fortitude to be prepared for a future of unknowns.

Despite these unknowns, Kelsey was certain that fossil fuels would remain central regardless of energy transition: ‘As there is a push for cleaner energy, liquefied natural gas will become a bigger part of it’. She explained that the biggest challenge for the future of natural gas was the ‘disconnect between people on the ground versus the people putting in the money’. Kelsey developed these insights through her participation in Texas A&M’s Petroleum Ventures programme. The programme, as Kelsey described, takes:

Thirty petroleum engineers and thirty finance students and cross pollinate[s] us … There is high demand from Goldman Sachs where they want to hire petroleum engineers. They want somebody on their side who knows what. We’ll be the next leaders of the industry.

In this programme, students are taught that integrating knowledge of finance capital would extend the life of fossil fuels, reflecting broader trends of financialisation driving the industry’s continued investment in production (Labban, 2010).

The Petroleum Ventures Programme also helped Kelsey map out her personal trajectory. After graduation she would work in the oil fields to gain on-the-ground experience, ideally with ExxonMobil; she would then get an MBA. With this experience, she would then start her own company and become a captain of industry. She cited John D. Rockefeller as her inspiration, a risk-taking visionary who, in her rendering, transformed the world. In College Station, petro-education merges the adventure of oil discovery and boom-and-bust commodity cycles to liberal tenets of individual responsibility and freedom; these principles are fused with the neoliberal restructuring of the industry through a curriculum that supplements technical knowledge with soft skills in finance, entrepreneurship, and leadership.

These ideas were also prevalent among Qatar-based students but took a different form. TAMUQ students were also being told they would be engineering leaders who had to adapt to unknowns, but unlike Kelsey, they did not have access to the Petroleum Ventures programme. Some students’ Rockefeller desires were more locally focused – in this context, to be the future CEO of Qatar Petroleum. Danya had overheard TAMUQ faculty dismissing this aspiration, especially when it came from Qatari men, who they regularly stereotyped as lazy and not hardworking; building on existing stereotypes of Gulf Arabs, faculty assumed these men to merely want the prestige associated with the title. Instead of the visionary neoliberal future promoted for students like Kelsey at the main campus’ Petroleum Ventures programme, oil’s cyclical temporality was mediated in Qatar by other ideas of work that anticipated labouring beyond retirement age.

During the 2018–2019 academic year, the Qatar Society of Petroleum Engineers at TAMUQ invited an industry engineer to discuss the future of oil and gas. Displaying a graph that projected the global energy portfolio a century into the future, the speaker admitted that there would be downturns. He asserted that even with energy transition, fossil fuels would remain a crucial part of the energy mix. The 2014 drop in the price of oil was on the minds of many students at the time. One asked if they should consider majoring in something broader than petroleum engineering. Attempting to dispel their concerns, the speaker argued that the latest downturn was not permanent. It just required flexible engineers to adapt. He said: ‘The human being is a wonderful piece of engineering. We are great at reinventing ourselves’.

Another student followed up by asking how they should prepare for automation of the oil field. The speaker responded with an argument about their generation’s necessary orientation to work: ‘There will be no pension. In the next thirty years, there will be a change where you might have to work forever’. This point was threaded throughout his presentation. Like Kelsey, he emphasised that there was one thing that was certain: the future would require fossil fuels. Displacing uncertainty onto questions of work ethic, he repeated that this generation would likely have to work until they die. He explained: ‘You will not be able to retire until seventy … or maybe eighty’. This messaging dovetailed with the buzzword, lifelong learning, which in recent years has been integrated into educational branding in Qatar. The speaker had merged the notion that the economy requires workers who regularly upskill with ideas about fossil fuel futures. His definition of work, while similarly linking success in petroleum engineering to personal attributes of adaptation, was distinct from the version Kelsey had learned through Petroleum Ventures. Instead of an education in finance that extends a market for oil commodities into the future for white US students expected to run oil and gas companies, Arab, Asian, and African students in Qatar are told that they, also commodities, will have to accept foregoing retirement in favour of ‘lifelong learning’.

These examples of petro-education depend upon and obscure labour hierarchies in the industry and in the Gulf, which are often based on race and nationality (Le Renard 2021; Wright 2021). Addressing a room of students from Qatar, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Oman, the speaker emphasised mobility as something they should embrace in their pursuit of lifelong learning. Unfettered mobility is not accessible to many TAMUQ students, who, unlike Kelsey, carry passports that come with a multitude of travel restrictions. For example, when Danya asked Basel, the Palestinian graduate of TAMUQ we mentioned earlier, what advice he would offer to future students, he quickly responded that they should not study chemical engineering if they ‘have a shitty passport’. He explained that specialisation makes it difficult to acquire work opportunities outside the Gulf: ‘You go to the US and you are asked, ‘do you know how to make explosives?’ If you study chemical engineering of course you do’. Others described similar issues barring them from research activities due to their nationalities, including staff and faculty who held passports targeted by US sanctions, such as Iranians, who make up a sizable population in the Gulf. Obscuring the uneven geopolitical and racial realities of labour within the industry, petro-education displaces students’ uncertainty into seemingly controllable actions they can take as individuals. Students, wherever and whoever they are, should adopt neoliberal orientations to work that are grounded in self-improvement. The speaker put it bluntly, the TAMUQ students would have to work until they die. Automation would require them to adopt this orientation to work whether they majored in petroleum engineering or not.

The petroleum engineering department on Texas A&M’s main campus, dating back to 1929, developed in relation to Texas’ ‘oil fraternity’ a ‘politically and socially dominant’ group consisting of ‘white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant … men, the vast majority of whom shared southern, rural or small town backgrounds’ (Constant, 1989, p. 454). Since the 1970s, the programme has attracted more students from outside this demographic. The main campus student population, however, continues to consist of large numbers of students who descend from the oil fraternity and related Southern white alumni networks. As we mentioned earlier, Texas A&M’s history as a segregated military college makes it a space where ideas about work are undergirded by masculinity, whiteness, and US imperialism while espousing liberal notions of individual freedom and self improvement. In an era of sustainability and climate action, these ideas of work have been repackaged in Qatar and Texas, fused with neoliberal policy buzzwords like entrepreneurship and lifelong learning. Students at both campuses learn that the future of fossil fuels, as well as the stratified labour markets and migration flows shaped by racial capitalism, are not the problem; it is their individual orientation to work that will lead to success or failure. Texan engineers like Kelsey are encouraged to imagine their future as a Rockefeller, while students in Qatar are derided for CEO aspirations as signs of their unwillingness to be hard workers.

This transnational process of petro-education shows how the production of petroleum engineering labour for fossil fuel extraction takes place on university campuses despite and even through sustainability rhetoric. Petro-education has long done this work in Texas, attaching any uncertainty regarding fossil fuels to ideas of oil markets as cyclical. Adapted for Qatar’s student body, petro-education emphasises that the risk is not in specialising in petroleum engineering, but rather whether students can work through oil’s downturns while rehearsing what they have begun to naturalise: fossil fuels are the constant of the future.

Conclusion

By investigating a US university’s everyday operations in Qatar, we can better learn how the fossil fuel industry is entangled with US higher education. The contradictions we unpacked at TAMUQ – between the rhetoric of sustainability and climate action and practices that reproduce the industry’s economic power – are not unique to Qatar. US universities are increasingly promoting themselves as leaders in sustainability, framing liberal education as the source of practices, behavioural changes, and innovations that will eventually push the broader US public and the world to be more environmentally conscious and prepare for transformed futures. At the same time, US universities maintain their material ties to the primary sources of climate collapse and environmental destruction through various mechanisms: accepting funding from the industry, corporate philanthropy, financial investments, producing labour and expertise, maintaining a revolving door between the industry and university leadership, and even leasing university-owned lands for extraction (Ladd, 2020).

These relationships between academia and industry work to incorporate a variety of proposals for energy transition while simultaneously assisting in keeping the industry’s assets in fossil fuels profitable for as long as possible. As multiple and sometimes contradictory post-oil visions of the future filter into the spaces of higher education, we show how petro-education works to either directly draw students into the industry or redirect their aspirations toward the work of greening one of the primary sources of the climate crisis. The forms of petro-education and neoliberal subject formation at TAMUQ, which we explored here through Danya’s ethnographic research, highlight the role of liberal education in reproducing the fossil fuel industry, through the production of stratified labour for its operations.

Along with the belief in liberal education as a site of progress, US universities increasingly produce neoliberal citizens, who internalise ideas of individual work ethic, entrepreneurship, and socially responsible consumer choices. The systemic critiques and interests that students come to campus with are redirected to actions they can take as innovative individuals both within the industry and outside it: foregoing retirement, lifelong learning, greening the industry, and more. US higher education works in conjunction with the oil and gas industry to reinforce the idea of a ‘green’ transition that remains reliant on private oil and gas corporations, many of which are based in the US, or have grown through the heavy influence of US industry consultants and oilfield service companies, such as the nationalised corporations in the Gulf.

US universities have long served as laboratories for mobilising liberalism to help reconcile contradictions of capitalism in the United States and globally. As we have shown through ethnographic research at TAMUQ, it is through the mobilisation of liberal education that petro-education smooths over potential contradictory visions of the future and naturalises an unquestionable future for fossil fuels in Qatar and the Gulf. The international activities of US universities during this contemporary period of university re-branding to address the climate crisis reveal the many faces of liberalism. When these partnerships are deemed as failures or criticised as superficial greenwashing projects, it is most often the host states and societies, tagged as illiberal and authoritarian, that are blamed, propping up the idea that US universities are fundamentally attempting to further progress in the region. These oil regimes, however, have developed within imperial relationships with the US and continue to uphold the prosperity of the West (Kadri, 2014) and its development of liberal democratic ideologies and institutions (Mitchell, 2011), a project in which US higher education has played a role. A critical analysis of the ways that liberalism, neoliberalism, and environmentalism come together within US universities at home and abroad allows us to move beyond merely dismissing campus climate action as greenwashing, instead revealing spaces of higher education to be key actors in the perpetuation of climate disaster.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danya Al-Saleh

Danya Al-Saleh is an Assistant Professor in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington.

Neha Vora

Neha Vora is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of International Studies at the American University of Sharjah.

Notes

1 The research drawn on in this paper had both IRB approval from Danya Al-Saleh’s home institution University of Wisconsin – Madison IRB (Study # 2017-0062) and a local IRB approval in Qatar through Georgetown University at Qatar (IRB Study # 2018-0397) for a study titled “The role of engineering education and expertise in Qatar’s transition to a knowledge-based economy.” All participants went through the informed consent process, however, signatures were waived. All interviews conducted are anonymized and all references to people interviewed are pseudonyms. Any potentially identifiable titles, career trajectories or positions have been changed to further anonymize interviews.