The following piece is an opinion and does not reflect the views of The Eagle and its staff. All opinions are edited for grammar, style and argument structure and fact-checked, but the opinions are the writer’s own.
American University has spent nearly two decades turning its campus into an exemplar of climate‑conscious operations. It became the first United States university to reach carbon neutrality in 2018, powered by a massive solar partnership in North Carolina and aggressive energy‑efficiency work on campus.
Now, at the Kogod School of Business, a different kind of climate transformation is underway. Kogod brands itself as both a leading sustainable business school and AI‑first, with AI in the DNA of [its] education. Side by side, those narratives are in tension.
Kogod calls itself a leader in sustainable business and impact, while aggressively branding itself as an AI pioneer. Since March 2025, every Kogod student has access to Perplexity AI’s Enterprise Pro, and the school is continuously offering more AI‑related business classes.
Kogod’s AI page reads that, as it works toward a more sustainable AI infrastructure, it also believes AI is essential to scaling organizations’ sustainability impact and helping business leaders build a better world. These inclusions suggest some recognition that AI may pose environmental and sustainability issues.
What is largely missing, though, is the kind of concrete, operational language that defines the broader University’s sustainability plan. The AI information from Kogod does not spell out measurable goals for AI‑related energy use, data center emissions or procurement standards for AI-related infrastructure. There are no targets to limit the carbon footprint of large‑scale model training, nor guidance on when it might be environmentally preferable not to use computationally intensive tools like Perplexity.
The University said in a statement to The Eagle that, “At Kogod, the tension between AI growth and environmental responsibility is both an academic and operational imperative.” While the University may say exploring and addressing this conflict is its goal, the outcome is that Kogod’s large-scale use of AI is indirectly harming the environment and defying the University’s climate commitments.
The University said that “measuring AI’s environmental impact is still an emerging field, especially in a university context,” and noted that data center emissions occur off-campus and fall outside its greenhouse gas inventory.
Over half of the electricity powering data centers in the United States comes from fossil fuels, and the centers use billions of gallons of water every year.
American University’s sustainability plan does not treat digital infrastructure — such as data centers and AI tools — as its own environmental category. The University does not seem to consider how a rapid expansion of AI‑driven computing might complicate and render futile its energy‑reduction goals.
The result is a clear dissonance. American University has gone to great lengths to achieve carbon neutrality, and Kogod has spent years publicly building out sustainability programs and research. Today, Kogod is rushing to become an AI-first institution, offering paid, enterprise‑level access to generative tools and saturating its curriculum with AI-based courses without communicating the environmental costs of that shift.
Kogod acknowledges the overlap between AI and sustainability, suggesting awareness that AI tech should be included in conversations of climate infrastructure. Yet that awareness is not thoroughly reflected in Kogod, campus‑wide sustainability goals or public AI-related strategy documents.
Kogod presents sustainability as a problem AI can solve. But AI creates its own problem, one which the school shirks in favor of economic efficiency and competitive advantage.
American University has made its name on climate progress. It should not forget that mission now. The next sustainability metric must factor in the University’s AI-related ambitions.
Kogod must consider whether it can make good on both halves of its goals: sustainable business as good business, and AI‑powered business that is sustainably built.
Quinn Volpe is a senior in the School of Communication and Kogod School of Business and a staff columnist for The Eagle.
This article was edited by Harry Walton, Addie DiPaolo and Walker Whalen. Copy editing done by Avery Grossman, Arin Burrell,Paige Caron and Nicole Kariuki. Fact-checking done by Andrew Kummeth.
