Campus Climate Challenge - Making History

The Campus Climate Challenge is perhaps the largest student activist campaign in a long time - possibly since the Sixties. This is particularly true if you consider the level of organization which is high and proportionate to the high level of funding (over a million dollars/year). At a bare minimum, it is the largest US student environmental activist campaign.

I don't like using terms like "largest campaign" because it is hard to compare this campaign with things like the hundreds of local campaigns that diversified the student body, faculty, staff, programs, and academic courses of colleges and universities (ex. ethnic studies). You could call the establishment of a thousand student lgbt groups a campaign - in which case it'd be larger and more succesful than the Campus Climate Challenge. I guess the difference is that these grassroots movements for diversity where generally not coordinated at a national level.

For coordinated campaigns, the Campus Climate Challenge is competing with the anti-sweatshop campaign that hit around 150 schools (so 500 vs 150 - it wins), and the anti-apartheid movement in the Eighties (which I'm guessing was in the 100-200 school range???). I'm guessing that is has more funding that both movements, and also benefitted from having a larger base - as the number of student environmental groups exceeds that of other issues (peace, multi-issue/progressive, etc - unless the anti-apartheid movement could be said to have a base in the Black Student Unions, in which case there are as many of those as student environmental groups).

The Student Peace/Anti-War movement from post-Sept 11 is another contender, however while it has attracted a lot of people and groups, it has been too transient, faltering after the US invaded Iraq - and it has had difficulty in achieving concrete institutional change goals (Ex. ROTC has not been removed from a single campus, military recruiters have only been pushed off a handfull of campuses).

It will be interesting to observe what happens to the Campus Climate Challenge. Will it get several hundred colleges and universities (and high schools?) to reduce their global warming emissions and then lose its strong sense of direction as it adopts multiple smaller campaigns - like what happenned with the United Students Against Sweatshops (note: this isn't a critique of USAS - which appears to be doing pretty well currently, it's just an observation)? Will the Campus Climate Challenge continue to recieve a large amount of funding or will the money dry up? My guess is that global warming as an issue is here to stay and that the money will continue. There are many liberal foundations and rich millionaires (ex. Soros, Gates, Google's new foundation that did a matching donation program for Campus Climate Challenge - so it could possibly give them some of its hundreds of millions) who like to fund liberal causes - and global warming is a big one. The risk is that if students win their campaigns and lose direction, that the global warming money might go to non-student groups.