Will say that I commend the bravery of this position—I respect people who take bold stances on issues of moral importance, even if I don’t personally agree with them—but I do think it’s very brave and potentially at risk of being damaging in the current political climate.
Universities, particularly in the UK and the US at the moment, are peak culture war discourse source territory and the last thing you’re aiming for at the moment is being sucked into that all-consuming cheap political narrative. I get the appeal of universities (young people skewing more in favour of this stuff + climate action), but anything radical and left-coded coming out of universities these days is consumed by it all. Regrettably, the first I saw of this campaign was a press piece using the campaign as raw meat for cheap political point scoring. You don’t have to be supportive of the game to end up on the board, so best to understand the state of play.
Having previously been approached to sign a similar pledge but in a local government context, I ended up having to issue a fairly middle-of-the-road statement stating why we weren’t willing to sign it. The core of the problem wasn’t the ask, but the political backlash that taking a stance on a matter that’s very swept up in the culture war narrative would have cost us wasn’t a trade I was willing to make at the stage in the election cycle that we were at. We have taken stances on other issues in this cluster of political sensitivity, such as gender-neutral bathrooms and air quality improvement work, this cause just wasn’t the one we chose to spend our limited political capital on. Worth considering for anyone working on this sort of advocacy.
Reflecting on this, and the recent piece on the Pledge, I’m more optimistic about across-the-aisle campaigns focused on reducing the consumption of the worst for-welfare animal product options in the current climate until either A. The political climate around these issues improves or B. The window is shifted enough that such stances aren’t as ‘radical’ as they are at the moment.
Nonetheless, I wish the folks working on this well.
Will say that I commend the bravery of this position—I respect people who take bold stances on issues of moral importance, even if I don’t personally agree with them—but I do think it’s very brave and potentially at risk of being damaging in the current political climate.
Universities, particularly in the UK and the US at the moment, are peak culture war discourse source territory and the last thing you’re aiming for at the moment is being sucked into that all-consuming cheap political narrative. I get the appeal of universities (young people skewing more in favour of this stuff + climate action), but anything radical and left-coded coming out of universities these days is consumed by it all. Regrettably, the first I saw of this campaign was a press piece using the campaign as raw meat for cheap political point scoring. You don’t have to be supportive of the game to end up on the board, so best to understand the state of play.
Having previously been approached to sign a similar pledge but in a local government context, I ended up having to issue a fairly middle-of-the-road statement stating why we weren’t willing to sign it. The core of the problem wasn’t the ask, but the political backlash that taking a stance on a matter that’s very swept up in the culture war narrative would have cost us wasn’t a trade I was willing to make at the stage in the election cycle that we were at. We have taken stances on other issues in this cluster of political sensitivity, such as gender-neutral bathrooms and air quality improvement work, this cause just wasn’t the one we chose to spend our limited political capital on. Worth considering for anyone working on this sort of advocacy.
Reflecting on this, and the recent piece on the Pledge, I’m more optimistic about across-the-aisle campaigns focused on reducing the consumption of the worst for-welfare animal product options in the current climate until either A. The political climate around these issues improves or B. The window is shifted enough that such stances aren’t as ‘radical’ as they are at the moment.
Nonetheless, I wish the folks working on this well.