ESG (Environment, Social, and Governance) and its companions Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and stakeholder capitalism have been criticized, rebranded, and, in some cases, abandoned. But just as some organizations are quietly maintaining but renaming their ESG plans, business schools across the nation are still indoctrinating the next generation of managers, entrepreneurs, and CEOs with this controversial ideology.
Prestigious schools like the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), Georgetown University, Harvard Business School (HBS), and the University of California (UC), Berkeley, offer courses specifically to teach students ESG. Even in non-ESG business classes, ESG is integrated through stated program priorities and popular textbooks.
For example, UPenn’s Wharton School, ranked as the top business program by the U.S. News & World Report, advertises Impact, Value, and Sustainable Business as a key research pillar, with over 30 courses across undergraduate, online, and graduate programs alongside events, speakers, and certifications to advance an ESG mission. Within this pillar, the UPenn Zicklin Center for Governance & Business Ethics offers a workshop series with agenda-charged papers, including “Gandhi on Ethics and Politics of Redistribution: A Cosmopolitan Enquiry” and “Colonialism, Effective Altruism, and Reparations.”
Meanwhile, Corporate Social Responsibility and ESG Investment are graduate and undergraduate courses, respectively, at Georgetown’s business programs. And alongside these individual classes, the university offers a certificate in Sustainable Business, proclaiming: “Today, companies understand the need to incorporate sustainability approaches into all business activities and functions.”
Harvard Business School similarly offers a variety of courses that promote ESG, including Sustainable Investing, Global Climate Change, and Capitalism: Past, Present, Future. And through the HBS Business & Environment Initiative, the program “encourage[s] faculty and students to address climate change and environmental sustainability in MBA classrooms.”
On the other side of the country, UC Berkeley offers a Sustainable Capitalism online certificate targeted at executives through its law school. Berkeley’s Walter A. Haas School of Business also offers Strategic and Sustainable Business Solutions as a course, saying, “Viewing CS [corporate sustainability] and CSR [corporate social responsibility] from a corporate strategy perspective enables students to understand how considerations of social impact can, in fact, support core business objectives, core competencies, and bottom-line profits.”
However, it’s not just major universities championing this agenda. Textbook publishers McGraw Hill and Pearson integrate ESG, stakeholder capitalism, and CSR into their business and society, business ethics, and management materials, offering this ideology as though it is standard business practice to students across the country.
Even textbook providers outside of the curriculum monopoly have embraced ESG propaganda. OpenStax—a leading provider of free textbooks—champions stakeholder capitalism and ESG in its management and introductory business books.
These course materials provide fear-based statements and incorrect data to convince students that environmental activism is imperative in the corporate world. For example, OpenStax’s introductory business textbook tells students: “The world’s forests are being destroyed fast. Every second, an area the size of a football field is laid bare. Plant and animal species are becoming extinct at the rate of 17 per hour. A continent-size hole is opening up in the earth’s protective ozone shield. Each year we throw out 80 percent more refuse than we did in 1960; as a result, more than half of the nation’s landfills are filled to capacity.”
These purported environmental facts are misleading, if not outright false. For instance, in America, forests are actually growing, and it’s been known for years that the ozone hole environmental catastrophe is no longer a major environmental concern or may have even been a myth all along.
Additionally, as IW Features has highlighted, climate activism and stakeholder capitalism are not the only frameworks for ethical business or environmental consciousness. Sarah Phillips, a petroleum engineer, recently explained to IW Features how energy poverty contributes to millions of deaths each year and said that unleashing fossil fuels could save lives. She elaborated that innovation in the fossil fuel industry has offered fuel sources like natural gas that are both reliable and cleaner energy sources. However, the ESG framework largely ignores these facts.
Unfortunately, while ESG is instilled into the next generation of business leaders, everyday Americans who trust these experts to steward their retirement investments and financial goals are being subjected to an ideology that sacrifices investment returns, even by Harvard’s own admission.
Despite what students are taught, public corporations, financial advisors, and investment managers have a legal obligation to act in the best interests of shareholders, beneficiaries, advisees, and investors—which means maximizing return on investment. Not to mention that studies suggest ESG investments do not offer better environmental or social results.
“The renewable percentage of our global energy hasn’t changed,” Sarah Phillips previously told IW Features. “But billions of dollars are being poured into it.”
Yet, if business schools continue to push this ideology, billions more from ordinary Americans’ taxes and savings will be wasted on a fruitless ideology.
