Our second demand is that UC San Diego must teach the climate crisis and climate justice to all undergraduates. This is a critical part of preparing students to think about what will be the biggest issue in many of their lives, and also preparing them for the job market that will increasingly be oriented towards mitigation and adaptation.
Up until now, undergraduate course offerings on the climate crisis (as opposed to the physical science of climate) have been quite inadequate at UC San Diego. For example, in Spring 2020, there were perhaps 200 seats in such classes, out of an undergraduate population of 29,000, see here. More generally, a wider list of classes across quarter is here. Few of these are about the socio-political-economic aspects of the climate crisis, some are narrowly about climate science.
For 3 years, the UCSD Green New Deal has waged multiple campaigns to try to bolster teaching on campus, from presentations in large undergraduate classes, to general campus faculty workshops, to presentations in the medical school, to trying to build the climate crisis into existing classes.
With our pressure, our allies in the Campus Climate Change Committee (CCCC) of the academic senate succeeded in bringing this to campus leadership who control teaching and in-principle acceptance of a General Education requirement was forthcoming in 2021. As of early 2023, the senate is in the process of figuring out how to implement this General Ed requirement.