'It's like tobacco funding health research': should universities take money from fossil fuel?

Fossil fuel companies have infiltrated universities for years. Are students and academics increasingly turning against them?At a recent green innovation event at Imperial College, London, PhD candidate Naomi Pratt and several other students handed out flyers. They were holding elephants on sticks, or "oilophants", to represent the elephant in the room at the discussion: Imperial's links with the fossil fuel industry. "Within two minutes we had security guards coming round saying 'you can't hand out flyers here, you can't have this sign. Move along, you've made your point,'" Pratt says.Pratt is the leader of Divest Imperial, a group set up to pressure the university to eliminate financial investments in fossil fuel companies from its endowment fund, and reduce its reliance on research funding from the fossil fuel industry. Although their protests are not always shut down, the recent event wasn't her only experience of being asked to stop flyering in a public part of campus. "It's a stark example of how Imperial is run as a business, and how it's trying to control its image," she says. Continue reading...