http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/11/14/marthers<snip>
Institutions of higher education are rarely founded to achieve quiet local success. Grand visions animate beginnings, motivate donors and help recruit leaders. Educating socially responsible or moral citizens is the raison d’etre for many colleges. Jesuit institutions such as Georgetown University impart the ideal of service for others. Quaker influenced institutions like Earlham College instill respect for consensus-based community governance. There is a strong populist tradition behind much of public higher education, embodied in the land grant university ideal of places such as the University of Wisconsin that produce new knowledge, develop inventions and harness research to help society and the economy. Other institutions have core commitments to correcting disadvantage due to gender (Smith College), race (Grambling State University), or socioeconomic status (Berea College). Each represents a type of institution historically tied to the notion that social responsibility is intrinsic to the education being imparted. Modeling and teaching sustainable behavior can be another way to stay true or reconnect to the ideals at the heart of an institution’s founding vision. A green agenda for higher education also cuts to the most basic core mission of any college or university, the goal of existing in perpetuity. In fulfilling institutional missions and by enabling institutional futures, then, green initiatives are mission centered.
Signs of Hope
Sustainable initiatives have been gathering momentum on campuses for over a decade. In 1995 Middlebury College’s trustees passed a resolution urging the campus community to practice responsible environmental stewardship and four years later resolved to reduce the college’s carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2012. Oberlin College opened the first green building on a U.S. college campus, the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, housing a living machine that purifies and recycles waste-water, containing features that produce more energy than the building uses. Tufts University became the first U.S. institution of higher education to agree to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol on reduction of greenhouse gases.
Nearly 10 years later, institutions like Connecticut College have written sustainability into their mission statements and the University of Wisconsin campuses at Green Bay, Oshkosh, River Falls, and Stevens Point intend to go “off the grid” by 2012, using only renewable energy. A growing number of colleges, including California State University at Chico, Evergreen State College, Middlebury, Oberlin, Northern Arizona University, and the University of British Columbia require that all new buildings and renovations meet or exceed best construction and renovation practices such as the standards necessary for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.
The impetus for sustainable design and green practices most often comes from student groups or faculty members. Carnegie Mellon University’s living roof started as a “what if” posed by three engineering students. Student initiative led the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh to establish an aquatics research lab to study Wisconsin’s waters. Maintenance workers at Northern Arizona University have suggested many of the ideas put into practice or selected for further investigation by the university’s faculty-directed Center for Sustainable Environments. Brown University responded to student interest with energy efficient renovations, environmentally responsible design of new buildings, courses on environmental stewardship, and employee trip reduction programs. And Reed College purchased electric cars and cleaned up a campus wetland.
<more>
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
