The topic for the Oxford Sustainable Career Week’s feature event – a plenary’, is ‘Can a corporate career ever be sustainable?’ Given the pressing climate emergency and the need for drastic change to ensure the capping of carbon dioxide emissions, would it be wrong to say that the title is somewhat insensitive, somewhat callous, to the crisis at hand?
Oxford Climate Justice Campaign has noted that the greenwashing entailed by the week runs much deeper than a superficial plenary discussion. Oxford defines greenwashing as ’activities by an organisation intended to make people think that it is concerned about the environment, even if its real business actually harms the environment‘ The Career Service’s position on sustainability is to, as stated on their website: ‘inform students for whom sustainability is an important factor in (employment decision making)’. This phrasing encapsulates the attitude of impartiality that the Careers Service is engaging in – neither condemning nor condoning corporations profiting from fossil fuels. OCJC sustains that providing ‘sustainable careers’ resources without promoting severance of ties from the fossil fuel industry constitutes greenwashing.
OCJC has therefore withdrawn support and involvement in all of Sustainable Careers Week’s events to boycott the Careers Service until real change is enacted. Specifically, OCJC disrupted the plenary event to protest the Service’s continued refusal to engage with Fossil Free Careers demands that the Student Union and OCJC have been pushing for the last three years.
The Fossil Free Careers campaign calls on ‘UK university careers service to end recruitment pipelines into the oil, gas and mining industries’. Historically, the Careers Service has broken ties with the tobacco industry, so a precedent for action in the name of public well-being is withstanding. Moreover, four UK universities: UAL, Birbeck, Wrexham Gylndwr and Bedfordshire, have already committed to fossil-free careers, paving the way for Oxford to join the movement and maintain its place at the forefront of progress.
Despite the position Oxford University Careers Service is in to implement change, progression towards the goal of fossil fuel delinking has stagnated, ironically, during Sustainable Careers Week. The Careers Service has taken the stance that the University ought to collaborate with fossil fuel giants, unable to recognise the credibility this affords the corporations responsible for the bulk of the climate crisis. Vice Chancellor Irene Tracey vindicated the University’s position by stating, ‘there has to be still that recognition and engagement of that industry’, and by condoning the University’s acceptance of £1.6 million from the fossil fuel industry in 2020-21. The ‘Careers in Energy’ event this Thursday is running alongside the Oxford Energy Society, which is sponsored by British Petroleum. In light of BP’s recent profit reports, both the Vice Chancellor’s claim and Career’s Services sustained engagement with fossil-fuel corporations highlight the futility of the university’s current approach to extractive industries.
Therefore, it is overwhelmingly explicit that Oxford Careers Service is exploiting and transferring the virtue of sustainability onto themselves without taking sufficient action to move towards the university’s Net-Zero goal. Following the boycott by OCJC on Tuesday, we hope the university seizes upcoming opportunities to establish a careers service that is genuinely sustainable in its ethos and action.
Madelina Gordon and Evelyn Byrne