Have you heard of the Doerr School’s first new affiliate program? Why not?

Originally sent on July 28, 2023

The Doerr School crossed an important milestone this summer: it got its first new Industrial Affiliate Program as a new school! And it started with a splash: a symposium featuring well-known scholars, activists, and corporate executives, and attended by over 200 (during the summer at a university).

You’d be forgiven for missing the hubbub, however. The Doerr School’s affiliate page doesn’t list the new program and neither the program’s launch nor symposium were reported in the Doerr School’s weekly roundups. The school’s monthly “Inside Doerr School,” Stanford’s “Energy News” newsletter, and Stanford’s “Explore Energy” newsletters omitted it. And the program’s homepage is unindexed on the Doerr School’s website (just try searching for it).

One example to contrast with this silence: The newsletter campaign associated with the Stanford Energy newsletter sent two emails on each of two days of the Doerr School’s StorageX summer symposium. These emails featured no information about other events, only info and a registration link for Storage-X’s symposium.

What’s going on?

The Doerr School’s newest affiliate program, Mineral-X, stands out from its peers. At present, it is the only Doerr School affiliate program to explicitly reject funding from fossil fuel companies. Its founder, Prof. Jef Caers, made this commitment publicly in a talk hosted by the Coalition and in a piece for Nature Geosciences. This isn’t only a matter of principle: to our knowledge, Mineral-X is currently the only Doerr School affiliate program that does not actively accept money from fossil fuel companies.

Mineral-X is also noticeably more focused on environmental justice than its peer programs. For instance, one can contrast Mineral-X’s plans to build in social impact assessments to its research in the early stages, even before minerals are found, with Stanford’s new battery center’s exclusive focus on technological innovation or Storage-X’s exclusively technological and commercial mission statement.

We wanted to share this exciting news, since clearly the Doerr School administration did not.

And by the way, have you ever wanted to learn more about Stanford’s other, much more highly-publicized initiative that ends in “X?” Stay tuned for our next installment.