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November 2006 Campus Team Reports
and Closing Remarks |
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Greening the Campus:
Exploring Practices,
Curriculum, and Management in Higher Education
Purchase College (SUNY)
Performing Arts Center 
735 Anderson Hill Road
Purchase, New York
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Campus Team Reports
Michelle Land: I just want to give you some guidelines for our campus team meetings. You are going to talk amongst yourselves now for about half an hour, and here are some ideas that we want you to talk about.
What are your next steps when you get back to your campus? Try to be as specific as you can. Even if it is as simple as getting out your calendars and figuring out a meeting time for all of you to meet back at your campuses. It can be something that simple, or something more complex if you are able to. For example what do you need from the Consortium - what can we provide to you to help you when you get back to your campus? We want to know these things. We’ve got curriculum funding, we’ve got a resource person that is going to be available for compliance and for greening. So, we want to know what you need from those resources in order to further your own campus greening efforts.
And how should this process continue? Should this be something we do annually to get together and talk about campus greening initiatives? Should we have somebody at your school be a liaison to us? What kind of things, specifically, can the Consortium participate in?
Maybe there is an annual report of initiatives? That is something we could talk about. But it would be good to have two or three things that you decide at the end of your meeting that you are taking back to your campus to act on, just to get the ball rolling from the momentum of yesterday and today. So we are going to give you about a half hour to talk, and then we’ll do some quick report outs from those that have ideas, and we will conclude at about 4:15 p.m.
[Campus teams met]
Michelle Land: I think we have time for a couple of reports. If there is anyone willing to report on their conversation, that the Consortium could benefit from, and your colleagues here in the room could benefit from, we’d like to hear from you. Maybe just a couple of tables that are enthusiastic about reporting. Okay, City College, come on up to the microphone.
Sophia Seeramlal: Hi, my name is Sophia, and I’m from City College, and we actually met up with other colleges in the CUNY system. And what were are doing is going to form a coalition and take all of our issues to CUNY as a whole, and we are really excited about that, and we are going to be meeting once a month from now on to just get ourselves started.
Michelle Land: Thank you! Who else is willing to say a few words. Marist?
Mike Tannenbaum: I think what we want to do is work on multiple fronts to raise awareness of the sustainability issue as a means of changing the campus culture. So, among other things we talked about were to develop a “lights off” campaign. We’re not sure exactly how, but we’ll start discussing it when we get back. We’d like to show a video of David Orr’s presentation, either the entire talk, or edit it down to various campus constituencies: students, faculty in charge of the curriculum, perhaps administrators and the Board, so that we drive home the message that we need to change, and we need to change soon. Maybe couple that with part of the Inconvenient Truth film. We’d like to promote residence hall competitions and contests focused on conservation and saving energy, etc. Find ways to better reduce water consumption, beyond what we are already doing. Investigate some kind of rewards system for faculty, students, administrators, etc. to recognize them for any sustainability actions. We’d like to mobilize students, perhaps, by taking a play on our sports team. Our teams are the Red Foxes, so we could develop a student group called the “Green Foxes” that take responsibility for these types of things. We’d like to involve the campus media, we have a lot of communications majors, we do radio and TV advertising, incorporate some kind of green messages into their course work and projects.
What we would like from the Consortium would be a video of David Orr’s presentation. We’d like to run a workshop or retreat for the faculty to teach them how to integrate sustainability across the curriculum. We might want recommendations from facilitators from that. With regard to physical facilities, if the Consortium could act as a clearinghouse for information to prove to those who doubt, that it doesn’t cost any more to build a building to LEED specifications or to build green. Finally, we’d like the Consortium to help us with strategies to help get the top administrators on board to buy into sustainability.
Michelle Land: Thank you, Mike. What a productive group! We have time for a couple more if anyone else would like to contribute their thoughts from your discussions today. Lee, go ahead.
Lee Paddock: Hi, I’m Lee Paddock from Pace Law School. We had a couple of interesting ideas in addition to the fact that at this meeting we have created a team that will meet monthly at the Law School, which is a big move. We are starting a curriculum redesign at the Law School for our environmental curriculum in January. So it is a perfect time for us to begin thinking about how to incorporate this. We have an energy class that we teach in the spring, and we talked to Roger Panetta about possibly doing student projects which would be the legal history of different power plants up the Hudson River as part of that class, which I think could be very interesting. We have an old building on the campus, which happens to house our Energy Project, that is very energy inefficient, and figuring out ways of dealing with a very tight budget and energy efficiency in a very old building is one of the tasks that we are really interested in.
And then finally, our Environmental Law Society has been working for several years on changes in our cafeteria, and our buildings and grounds issues, and working very cooperatively with buildings and grounds. But we don’t have a very good history of that, and that is part of the fact that it is student groups that change each year so we are going to try to create a history of what has been done so that we have a good base to work forward and be able to celebrate some of the accomplishments from the past few years.
Michelle Land: Great work, Pace Law School. We have time for just one more report out. How about Columbia? We’re putting you on the spot. Columbia is a nice big group.
Melissa Wright: Hi, my name is Melissa Wright, and I’m at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia. And we have a group of about five or six people here who are in the same program, and we are doing environmental science and policy. And, the past semester I have been leading a group that is doing some research on feasibility analysis on some sustainability projects for Columbia University and we didn’t know any of these folks from Barnard College before we got here, but it has been a really exciting meeting. We’ve gotten a lot of information, and because we are a one year program, we are really interested in making sure the information that we get and the data that we collect on the sustainability projects actually is put to work. And we think that with working with Barnard College and some of the ideas that they have are really great, so we are excited about the prospects.
Closing Remarks
Michelle Land: Thank you. As I walked around listening to some things being said, I was truly impressed by how enthusiastic everyone sounded. I’d like you to communicate all of your notes to us somehow. You don’t have to give me your raw notes today, but if someone could be responsible for just typing them up quickly and sending me your notes by email, you can send them to me directly at mland@pace.edu. If you would send those to me, we’ll create a document from that and we’ll put it on the website proceedings. We’ll make sure that the document is a living document that we continue working from. We’d also like to create a greening listserv from the attendees today, and we will reach out to you to see if you are interested in being on the list. And what we will do with that is continue keeping you updated on funding initiatives, we also want to have the Consortium Campus Greening Task Force meet to debrief the conference and to plan our own next steps based on your feedback. And finally, we also want to make sure that we look for student initiative opportunities, and that we will communicate those when they come up.
The Consortium is committed to keeping this going. It isn’t just a today-only thing. It is very important that we continue the momentum, so we will look to you for guidance on that, and we will provide you any support we can.
And so the last thing I want to say to everyone is that all of you need to give yourselves applause for being here today and being so committed. Thank you all for coming. This is a terrific conference. And all the logistic planning in the world can make a good technical conference. But if participants aren’t engaged, it doesn’t matter. You’ve been an outstanding group!
Thank you all, and enjoy your weekend.
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