"Sustainability" is a key idea on college campuses in the United States and the rest of the Western world. To many, sustainability is just a new name for environmentalism. But the word has come to mean something much larger: an ideology that demands new limits on economic, political, and intellectual freedom as the price that must be paid to ensure the welfare of future generations.

This report is the first in-depth critical examination of the sustainability movement in higher education. The movement, of course, extends well beyond the college campus. But the college campus is where...