Overwhelming Demand: Oxford Hit By Tsunami Of Apps To New Sustainability Master’s

POETS&QUANTS’ Q&A WITH LAURENCE WAINWRIGHT, DIRECTOR OF THE OXFORD MSc IN SUSTAINABILITY, ENTERPRISE & THE ENVIRONMENT

P&Q: You’ve taught in a lot of places around the world. You mentioned in a short promotional video for the MSc in Sustainability, Enterprise and the Environment how special Oxford is. A program like this is made all the more special by being at Oxford, isn’t it?

Laurence Wainwright: I think it is, yes. And Oxford’s a remarkable place — a thousand years of history. And maybe it sounds dramatic, but on my wall here I’ve got pictures of some of the people who have been here before. And when I catch myself sort of slacking off, I think, “What’s going to be my contribution to this place? What am I going to do? Am I going to use my time here well?”

You can almost sort of feel it when your finger’s in the air, the people who have been here before and the remarkable things that they’ve done, and you feel a sense of obligation to live up to those people and their legacy. And I think the students kind of feel that as well when they walk around the old buildings.

COP26 really changed the game for business schools, didn’t it? In terms of teaching about sustainability and the climate crisis. And particularly European business schools: things are really different since that.

I think they are. It’s wonderful. But look, I think 2018, early 2019 was probably the turning point. And people say, well Covid was what caused sustainability to be put at the front of the agenda. I actually don’t think it was. I think before that we reached a tipping point and suddenly this all became mainstream. And it was so exciting when it did, because when I did my master’s in sustainable development in Uppsala in Sweden back in 2013, that was when we thought this was just going to be a trend. And it wasn’t. It might not be here to stay, but sustainability is well and truly of age now.

And I think the reason why courses like ours are being so popular is not because of anything that I’ve done, it’s because people are realizing that we need to get a skill set in this, in the natural sciences, in the social sciences. We want to be able to go into a room confidently and talk about the physics of climate change and also be able to create ESG metrics, to be able to interpret them. And I think around the world industry is crying out for people with these capabilities. And that’s part of the reason we put this course together.

Even though, as you have pointed out, a lot of the elite U.S. schools are launching programs in sustainability, in ESG, in corporate social responsibility, I still encounter some skepticism when I talk to people about the entire edifice of graduate business education embracing this, as opposed to the old school “money first” kind of mindset. What’s your answer to that skepticism? 

It’s a wonderful question. I came from a business school background originally. So now I find myself placed in the School of Enterprise and the Environment. So I feel like a bit like a duck out of water. I think the MBA, as it was originally conceptualized, is no longer relevant to today’s day and age. The underlying assumption that it was embedded in — a sort of Milton Friedman shareholder-primacy view of business — has fundamentally changed. And we now find ourselves looking at challenging a lot of these assumptions about the relationships between business, society, and nature, where we’re realizing that business does not exist in isolation — it’s interdependent. It’s intrinsically, inseparately intertwined with the societies that it operates in.

It’s not just enough to tack something on the side and have a subject in corporate social responsibility, and go through the routines and then move on. We actually genuinely have to be embedding sustainability deeply within business schools, within programs like MBAs, especially given the number of CFOs and CEOs with an MBA background who go on to lead these companies. If we can actually get them doing courses with sustainability deeply ingrained, then we can actually lead some real systemic change. So that’s a bit of an all-over-the-shop answer, but yes, I think thinking is fundamentally changing, and we are away from this idea of the famous New York Times piece from Friedman saying, “The business of business is business” and so on. We’re definitely past that now.

Oher universities are starting to catch up. But I think it has to be done properly. And like brainwashing, business schools can also do a really good job of making out so they’re taking sustainability seriously and so on, and you look behind the curtains and you realize that there’s not actually much meaningful going on. So yes, I’m optimistic. I think a lot of good is happening, and I think people are always going to be banging on the window saying, “Well, it’s not fast enough, and we need to change things.” But it’s impossible to go from nothing to great. There has to be steps along the way. And I think now we’re at a situation where things are not perfect, but they’re getting a lot better.

Oxford’s new program is part of that, but as you say, there are a lot of new programs in sustainability and a lot of new programs that candidates might choose to apply to. What’s the differentiator here, besides your involvement?

I think we should think about a spectrum here: We start with a classic sort of environmental science degree, which has been around for a long time. Then we start to move along the spectrum and we might have a sociological take on sustainability, like a developmental economics type. Then we might have on the other far end a classic business frame. We have an MBA, and we might have an MBA here with a sustainability twist. What we sort of realized though, is that there was this this big gap between a full-blown MBA and an environmental science degree. And if I think back to my own MSc in sustainable development in Sweden, it was a lovely degree, but it was not realistic about the way that the world works.

One of the things we tried to do with this program was to make it realistic rather than idealistic about the world. Realistic about human nature, about markets, about business, about finance, about what goes on. And the whole premise is that we are going to prepare students with the skills and knowledge that they need from multiple different disciplines to go out into the world and lead impactful change towards net zero sustainable development. So we’re saying that business is a huge part of a reason we’re in this current mess, but it’s also, ironically, the way out of it. So let’s embrace business as an institution. Let’s work with markets rather than working against them. We don’t have to overthrow the system. We don’t have to overthrow capitalism. We have to rethink the way that we interact — rethink the relationship between business society and nature.

And what this course does which is really special is, it gives students a really broad standing. So we’re giving them the physics of climate change from some of the best in the world. We’re giving them ecological, environmental economics. We’re giving them finance. We’re giving them the classic sustainability, CSR business school-type stuff. We’re giving them the thinking that they need to be able to navigate complex adaptive systems and understand feedback loops, stocks and flows, and all the things that go on. We’re teaching them about the various socio-technical interventions that there are to tackle this problem we’re dealing with. We are giving them the whole smorgasbord and we’re crowding it into 12 months.

And we’re capping that off with pouring a bucket of cold water on their head every week and having practitioners come in and say, “This is what it’s like out in industry. This is what’s going on. I’ve just come from a meeting with my colleagues on the board, and we’re just speaking about this new sustainability initiative. It wasn’t going to make us money, it was going to lose money, so we decided not to do it.” So I’m getting these people every week just to make sure that they’re giving students the cold, hard truth. So when they’re ready to go out into the world, they’re not being idealistic about things.