Pulling the plug on sustainable debate

Remarkably, these posters and inspections failed to cause any real uproar on campus, aside from a post on The Prox, The Daily Princetonian’s blog. After all, unless you took a lucky guess that it was an experiment, you had to assume that the Office of Sustainability was actually going to post students’ names after break. It’s troubling to see what we’d actually be willing to tolerate in terms of shaming students with unorthodox positions on an issue like global warming.

Pull the Plug itself is a project of Students United for a Responsible Global Environment, or SURGE. It encourages dorm residents to unplug electronics and appliances over breaks. Last year, a senior thesis piggybacked on Pull the Plug to test various strategies for persuading people to participate, none of which involved posting individual student names. Caroline Jo ’13, a vice president of SURGE, said that aside from discussing where this year’s study would put its posters, SURGE “is not affiliated” with the experiment.

In early December, the housing office sent e-mails to residents of certain buildings informing them of an upcoming “sustainability survey” in which “University personnel and students will enter all rooms in your building” and “staff will check each room for energy savings.” Students were additionally informed that no fines would be issued as a result of these inspections and that nothing would be disturbed. Finally, residents were given the opportunity to opt out by sending an e-mail to the Office of Sustainability. A copy of this e-mail was posted online by the ‘Prince.’

Next, researchers placed posters outside each door in the selected hallways, except those rooms whose residents had opted out. Each poster bore the imprimatur of the “Sustainability Office,” with either the promise to post compliant students’ names or the threat to post non-compliant students’ names. The inspections checked to see whether televisions and refrigerators were unplugged in the rooms that did not opt out.

I certainly don’t mean to imply any ethical wrongdoing. The study was approved and monitored by the Institutional Review Board, noted Joseph Broderick, the compliance manager for the Office of Research and Project Administration. The experiment, like all IRB-approved studies, operated with appropriate safeguards. Sustainability Manager Shana Weber said in an e-mail that her office did not conduct the study but allowed its name to appear on posters in order to respect the design of the experiment. No one at the Office of Sustainability actually intended to post any names.

But there was no way of knowing that ahead of time. It’s hard to say exactly what the proper reaction should have been, but aside from some comments posted on The Prox and conversations among friends, I did not witness any outcry. Certainly there was nothing that would have stopped an actual effort by an arm of the University to post people’s names.

Would we accept members of the pro-abstinence community putting up posters threatening public shaming unless you sign an abstinence pledge? How about a pledge to not drink, followed by inspections of garbage cans outside doors for beer bottles?

To head off the inevitable ad hominems, I accept the scientific findings that the earth is getting warmer. I accept the importance of some sort of societal measures to slow the warming. I especially accept taking personal responsibility for conservation of resources, not to mention money, and personally pulled most of my own plugs.

But like everyone (hopefully), I don’t think dissenters should ever be publicly shamed into complying with a certain viewpoint (or even having a viewpoint at all) on a hotly contested issue. It doesn’t matter here how much scientific, religious or philosophical authority a cause may have. If the threats on those posters were real, we would have been allowing a majority to coerce a minority into holding certain opinions and engaging in supposedly optional behaviors.

Fortunately, this whole thing was actually a monitored experiment with no intention of actually shaming people. At the same time, it’s disturbing that the student body at large did not seem concerned about what we could only assume was an actual initiative. Going forward, perhaps the next time we see something promising to threaten the free flow of debate on campus, we’ll remember this moment and speak up.

Brian Lipshutz is a politics major from Lafayette Hill, Pa. He can be reached at lipshutz@princeton.edu.