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The Learning City
Project File: International
South Carolina Sustainable Universities Initiative
Partnering
- 3 major research universities in the state and 13 affiliate colleges
Serving
- Aims for spillover into government and municipal operations
Designing
- Green building programs in university housing offices
Teaching
- Series of service learning and sustainability courses developed
South Carolina Sustainable Universities Initiative
Location of SUI Founding (dot) and Affiliate (square) members in South Carolina
The South Carolina Sustainable Universities Initiative began in 1998 as a collaboration of the three major research universities in the state, Clemson, Medical University of South Carolina, and the University of South Carolina. The initiative has since added thirteen affiliate four-year and technical colleges. The initiative aims to include a comprehensive breadth of sustainability issues across entire campuses and university communities and, with luck, spillover into state government operations and the surrounding communities. It has been a breakthrough for the program to counterbalance a good deal of the traditional competition between schools for funding and students by providing a collaborative framework for interaction.
Integrating environmental and sustainability issues into curricula has proceeded best in English programs and in pediatric curricula at the Medical University. A series of courses has been developed incorporating service learning projects and sustainability. These projects range from issues of landscape design for native plant gardens and contemplation gardens at churches to engineering design problems on campus, to work with children on sustainability themes, to creating an educational video and resource booklet for incoming freshmen (http://www.sc.edu/fye/publications/index.html 
). Additionally, green building programs have been implemented with the university housing offices at several member universities.
The program is attempting to expand and solidify many of its loose connections with a range of partners, from the State Energy Office, Department of Health and Environmental Control, and Department of Commerce, local business and industry, and community groups. Although the program does produce annual reports, developing better means of assessing the program's effectiveness and progress is another of the areas for future development of the initiative.
Support from a private foundation has been critically important in the initiative's development. Not only has the funding enabled the program to buy equipment, fund pilot studies, and offer faculty salary support, it has provided legitimacy to the program with university administrators, who “pay attention” once they “hear that a foundation with business interests in South Carolina is concerned enough to put significant funding into sustainable development.” Now that this initial funding has drawn to a close, and state government seems in a poor position to provide assistance in the immediate future, additional private funding will be necessary to keep the program going.
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Website: www.sc.edu/sustainableu
Source: Patricia L. Jerman, Program Manager, Sustainable Universities Initiative, interview 24 February 2004.
Stow College, Scotland
Teaching
- Embedding Sustainability curriculum program
Stow College Embedding Sustainability Project
Stow College is a Further Education College in the centre of Glasgow, currently serving 8000 students in developing vocational trades. The Strathclyde European Partnership, Scottish Qualifications Authority, Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, and the Scottish Further Education Funding Council have joined forces in ‘Embedding Sustainability,' the college's attempt at comprehensive curriculum change to include knowledge and awareness of sustainability in all programs. The structure of funding from the European government provided the impetus for the project. European Structural Funds contribute about £165 million per year to economic development in Scotland. The European Commission now has embraced the social, environmental and economic integration element of sustainable development in specifying that further education colleges should “incorporate sustainable development issues” into “the content of training . . . wherever possible and appropriate” (Thomas & Faulk 2002, 8).
The Scottish Qualifications Authority has the responsibility of validating and accrediting all course frameworks according to criteria of student performance and competence. ‘Embedding Sustainability' seizes the opportunity for building competencies related to sustainability into this accreditation process. In addition to these specifications, June Thomas, the Sustainable Development Coordinator, worked to produce templates for instructors, to help them adapt these requirements to personal teaching style and content. These templates may be applied along with their specifications to all 47 further education colleges in Scotland.
This dissemination and awareness-raising, which includes national publications and UK-wide associations, will take considerable work, but at least within Stow, Thomas has met “some slow success”: increased awareness of sustainability among staff, the production of teaching material for use by an array of lecturers, and the involvement of a group of stakeholders to ensure implementation of the proposed new courses. At Stow, two new course units have been produced: ‘Promoting Sustainability: The role of the individual' and ‘Promoting Sustainability: the role of organizations.'
The major innovation of the project, however, has been the development of a methodology to engage staff and faculty in embedding sustainability into the further education curriculum. This has involved measures of persuasion and time management skills, since the challenge of changing the practice of instructors school-wide has been difficult to facilitate. In addition, this is only one of Thomas's responsibilities as Sustainable Development Coordinator. Thomas has proposed that integration of sustainability ideas across the curriculum is possible, and that a commitment to embed sustainability into all courses should serve as a key awareness-raising mechanism. Work continues to expand the scope of Embedding Sustainability, with cross-college working groups as a helpful tool to give the project momentum.
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Website: www.stow.ac.uk
Source: June Thomas, Sustainable Development Coordinator, Stow College, interview 24 February 2004.
Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona
Designing
- REAL Laboratory developed on former industrial land, using green technologies
Teaching
- School Curriculum Greening Plan to assess and design 'green' curriculum
Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona
Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) includes 22 technical schools and faculties and a student body of 35,000 in and around Barcelona. For the past eight years, UPC has taken strategic and increasingly holistic attempts to introduce first environmental, now sustainability, elements into all aspects of the university, and to measure and improve upon the results of these attempts. In 1996, UPC approved its First Environmental Plan and created its first Environmental Plan Coordination Office with one paid staff member and a primary intent to “green the curriculum” for graduate and undergraduate education and secondary intents to establish environmental plans in research, university life, awareness-raising and coordination. For curriculum greening, projects pursued included the development of a manual for each school or faculty describing opportunities for studying environmental impacts in major student research projects.
Following this, from 1998-2000, 11 of 15 schools within the university produced a School Curriculum Greening Plan (SCGP), each of which established the profile of environmental knowledge the students ought to learn, designed an “optimal greened curriculum” as well as an action plan for its implementation. Department Greening Plans (DGP) within each school came next. These 23 completed plans expand the scope of the SCGP within departments to include ideas for “greening” research and other departmental actions.
While creation of SCGPs involved consultation with professional associations and alumni, DGPs were produced with intensive consultation with lecturers, staff, and students in specific departments. A “keywords method” was developed to estimate the environmental and sustainability-related content of courses across the curriculum, based on course descriptions.
Numerous other initiatives were part of the First Environmental Plan. The REAL (Research Laboratory for Environmental Excellence on the Castelldefels Campus) Laboratory emphasizes environmental research on the UPC campus, in transportation, green building, and limnology of the campus lagoon. A new course was developed, called “Environment and Technology, Environmental Education in Engineering,” which is under consideration for being made mandatory across campus. Integrated Selective Waste Collection Plans were established to decentralize the responsibility for waste management and efficiency improvements. A Virtual Resources Centre on Curriculum Greening in Technology (e-ambiT) provides online access to data developed in the planning process. Additionally, a volunteer coordination program, called Volunteer and Participation in Solidarity Program, has been developed.
UPC's second environmental plan began in 2002 and will run through 2005. The new plan has multiple intents: to broaden the perspective on the environment at UPC to one of sustainability, to reduce the number of projects being pursued to prevent draining the energy of active participants, to better link projects throughout the university, have a better communications strategy, and improve the indicators of success.
Staff at the Environmental Plan Coordination Office has increased to four full-time employees, one graduate and three undergraduate students, and an additional senior advisor. The Office has recognized the “keywords method” of environment and sustainability content assessment is imperfect and in 2000 additionally implemented a graduate survey, asking newly-employed students their impressions of UPC's success at curriculum greening.
In the 2003 assessment, UPC found that 30% of research done at the institution is strongly related to environment and sustainability. Recognizing this as an important but insufficient estimate of the contribution of UPC to a sustainability-based curriculum and sustainability-oriented results, the Environmental Plan Coordination Office has begun work to create a map of these and other research activities, with the intent of promoting interdisciplinarity and external connections and serving as a meeting place for researchers throughout the university.
As UPC proceeds down the path of developing defensible sustainability progress indicators at all levels of the university, it produces a level of statistical and graphical results of sustainability programming that few other initiatives have. It also faces the challenge of pushing forward the value system of the entire university: “Adding sustainability as a new requirement means changing the decision criteria in the whole process chain, and has many difficulties to overcome” (Ferrer-Balas et al. 2003, 5).
Website: www.upc.es/mediambient
UPC Research activity points in environmental research (related to contributions to books, journals, conferences, etc.) (Ferrer-Balas et al. 2003).
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Columbia University
Teaching
- First PhD program in sustainable development, with science and policy training
Columbia University PhD Program in Sustainable Development
Columbia University's School of Public and International Affairs recently announced the launch of a new PhD program in sustainable development, the first of its kind. Six students selected in a global, highly competitive process, began the first semester of the five year program (on full scholarship) in Fall 2004. Spearheading this new program is Jeffrey Sachs, who came to Columbia from Harvard University to a large degree in order to implement this program, in conjunction with Columbia colleague Joseph Stiglitz. The program will grant a social science PhD that requires four graduate level natural sciences courses as well as integrative seminars in which students learn to look at policy issues with both scientific and social scientific eyes. It will benefit from the worldwide view and extensive professional and personal networks of the two eminent scholars at its head: Jeffrey Sachs, for example, spent over 20 years at Harvard University, and has consulted for the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Health Organization, and US Congress. Joseph Stiglitz received the Nobel Family Prize in Economics for his work in the economics of information and has taught at many prominent universities and worked as Chief Economist at the World Bank.
The motivating concept behind the PhD program is expressed by Steven Cohen, Director of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs Graduate Program in Earth Systems, Science, Policy and Management: “If sustainable development is to be a thriving field, the constraints to behaviour are ecological and physical and policy makers need to factor those constraints into their thinking. In this program, we want to train the translators, the people who can work with both the scientists and policy makers.” Developing the knowledge base to fill the gaps between the changes that many see as crucial and the steps and research needed to make these changes are the program's key goals. Program developers expect a portion of graduates to work in government and international agencies such as the World Bank and a portion to work in academia, although currently, the sparse selection of interdisciplinary programs in higher education will limit this stream. Other graduates may work in policy think tank organizations.
Columbia's Earth Institute already has in place a Climate and Society masters degree that begins with a course sequence in environmental science and finishes with a policy-oriented course sequence, attempting to integrate the necessary scientific expertise with the equally necessary understanding of economic, social, and political processes in order to make improvements in decision-making. The PhD program will benefit from this experience, as well as the recent integration of the Lamont Earth Observatory in upstate New York into the Earth Institute. Though start-up funding for the program appears generous at about $12 million per year, it is Columbia's policy that all PhD students have five years of full financial support, so the program must continue to seek out external money from foundations and wealthy individuals in order to supplement funding streams from the profits of the masters programs and from the Columbia central administration.
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Website: www.sipa.columbia.edu/phd
Source: Steven Cohen, Director of Executive MBA Program and Graduate Program in Earth Systems, Science, Policy and Management, Columbia University SIPA, interview 23 February 2004.
Ball State University Council on the Environment
Serving
- Community outreach on eco-efficiency throughout Indiana
Designing
- Facilities reporting to community on eco-efficiency, campus ecological footprint analysis
Teaching
- Curriculum commitments to clustered minors in sustainability, faculty workshops
Ball State University Council on the Environment
In Muncie, Indiana, Ball State University's Greening of the Campus work began in 1991 with the appointment of members to Green Committee 1 by Provost Warren Vander Hill. His charge to the committee was “…to formulate recommendations which, if undertaken, might raise environmental consciousness in our student body, foster convictions in students regarding these issues, and empower them with understandings of how they might channel their awareness effectively to shape their future.” The Green-1 Committee made some 35 recommendations, of which some 20 were implemented -- in whole or in part -- over the next several years.
In 1999 then university President John E. Worthen was persuaded to sign the Talloires Declaration, committing the university to advancing further its history of green initiatives. Subsequently the provost, convinced by the utility of the original Green-1 committee work, decided to reconstitute the group to assist in implementing the tenets of Talloires. In 2000, a new committee, Green-2, consisting of 94 faculty, student, staff, and community members, produced 186 recommendations, including a proposal for the designation of a permanent secretariat to facilitate the work needed to meet the challenges of the Talloires Declaration.
This secretariat task was assigned to the Center for Energy Research, Education and Service. Its work is guided by the also newly-created and more environmentally-specific Council on the Environment, whose mission is to “promote the sustainable use of natural resources and the protection of ecological systems that sustain life.” The Council members include representatives from each faculty, department, the undergraduate and graduate student bodies, professional staff and community leaders from First Merchants Bank, Redtail Conservancy and the Cardinal Health System.
The Green-2 Committee also worked sustainability issues into the university strategic plan, which now states specifically: “Ball State University will promote a learning climate that values civility, diversity, multicultural awareness, appreciation of the arts, healthy and productive living, and environmental sustainability” with specific action elements to work toward this “learning climate.” The COTE achieved adoption of the BSU sustainability statement, which includes elements of learning, collaboration, leadership, campus cohesion, and waste reduction, by top university administration (www.bsu.edu/sustainability ).
Ball State's holistic systems approach to sustainability in the university includes commitments to eco-efficient facilities and green construction, curriculum commitments through the interdisciplinary and interdepartmental Clustered Minors in Environmentally Sustainability Practices Program, a biannual conference on Greening of the Campus, and faculty support for sustainability workshops and new course design. Students are currently working on developing a campus ecological footprint analysis, including an inventory and audit process for future analysis of progress.
General education in the community off-campus and facilitation of the citizenship function are the highest priorities needed for research, according to Green-2 co-chair Robert Koester. Progress in this direction includes: community based outreach addressing eco-efficiency and other topics that have touched well over 100 Indiana communities to date. The Center for Energy, Research, Education and Service is currently investigating ways to link citizen interest – including the interests of diverse faculty members — in broad sustainability issues with action, or ways that they can participate.
“The secret of our success,” says Koester “is in getting the academic and facilities departments to sit down at the table and talk to one another. The spin-offs are remarkable. Our facilities staff now reports to the community on the university's energy use and recycling, and the deans of the colleges have just agreed to a common set of four environmental studies minors programs in which case studies and field research are conducted with the help of our facilities staffs” (quoted in Mansfield 1998, 29).
Even with support from the university's president and provost, Ball State's sustainability initiatives have had to be creative in funding their work, looking beyond on-campus funds to major foundations and to the state government.
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Website: www.bsu.edu/cote
Source: Robert Koester, Co-Chair, Green Committee 2, Center for Energy Research, Education, Service, Ball State University, interview 3 March 2004.
Emory University Piedmont Project
Partnering
- Raises sustainability as an issue across disciplinary lines
Teaching
- Faculty and staff development activities with commitments to change courses
Emory University Piedmont Project
Established in 2000, Emory University's Piedmont Project aims for curriculum redevelopment and infrastructural and facilities development in line with sustainability. The project has four interrelated activities: a structured curriculum development program, a monthly “Faculty Green Lunch Group,” faculty and staff development activities, and an effort to link on-campus student research to campus facilities management (Barlett & Eisen 2002).
To date, 56 faculty members and five administrators have participated in the Piedmont Project, which operates throughout the central arts and science disciplines, five professional schools and the affiliated two-year college. The Piedmont Project's major success is in the enthusiasm it has raised for environmental issues among a diverse range of faculty members, from Spanish to Music to Business and Nursing Departments, as well as the more usual suspects from Environmental Studies, Biology, Law and Public Health. Faculty participants' enthusiasm is the main gauge of the project's success. Project coordinator Peggy Barlett repeats some of the comments of participants that emphasize the value of the information communicated as well as the venue for communication itself:
“the best faculty development activity I've participated in at Emory.”
“I learned a ton in there.”
“It was an intellectual feast.”
“[The discussion] was inspiring, informative, and joyful.”
“The key things I took away from the workshop were a certain excitement about the future here at Emory, a sense of growing community, and an excellent awareness of specific resources (people) around the campus.”
As part of participation in the Piedmont Project, faculty commit to changing one course however, 75% of participants report changing two or three of their courses to reflect the perspective they gained on sustainability. Moreover, 75% of participating faculty report that their teaching methods have changed toward experiential learning and interdisciplinary dialogue emphases, through fieldtrips, outdoor exercises, labs, writing assignments, and independent study options. Again, 75% believe their research has become more interdisciplinary as a result. Barlett's view on the key value of the project is this: “The quality of support for intellectual curiosity restores some of the intrinsic value of the academy, often lost in our pressures to publish and engage with a narrow, disciplinary audience.”
The Piedmont Project owes some of its direction to faculty development workshops held at Northern Arizona University and simultaneous efforts at Emory University like the university-wide Environmental Mission Statement, adopted by the University Senate in 2001. With continued enthusiasm to raise funds for further conferences and workshops, the Piedmont Project intends to continue its work toward “establishing an environmentally literate culture and community” (Barlett & Eisen 2002, 75).
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Website: www.environment.emory.edu
Source: Peggy Barlett, Professor of Anthropology, Emory University, interview 24 February 2004. Photo Credit: Jack Oxford