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Open Thread on College Sustainability Report Card

Oct 7 2009
Submitted by Niles Barnes on October 7, 2009 - 3:13pm

The Sustainable Endowments Institute released its  College Sustainability Report Card today. There often seems to be a desire within the campus sustainability community to discuss the Report Card so please use this space to share your thoughts. How is your campus reacting to the Report Card? Are you able to use the Report Card to advance sustainability on your campus? What do you like about it and what do you dislike about it? Are there things that you'd like to see changed?
 

 

Oct 8 2009

Endowment issues important, but remote

Submitted by Sonia Marcus on October 8, 2009 - 8:56am.

This has all been said before, but I'll just add my voice. I feel that the endowment issues are given too much weight overall. Our scores went up in Climate Change, Food & Recycling, and Green Building -- but we end up with the same overall score because SEI doesn't like what's happening with our endowment. Personally, I think there should be a combined grade for all the endowment issues (priorities, transparency, engagement) instead of the 3 that are used now. I just feel like those decisions are pretty remote from the day to day sustainability work on a campus. Maybe that's just a cop-out?

Oct 9 2009

Report Card

Submitted by John Sagebiel on October 9, 2009 - 1:07pm.

Hi Sonia,
No, that's not a cop-out. I have several issues with the way this process works. Yes, nothing is perfect, but we (Univ. Nevada, Reno) went from C- to B+ in one year. Most of that was due to changes in how we report our efforts, not the efforts themselves (which are great, don't get me wrong; I'm talking process). Our endowment rating in 2009 was an F, because we didn't report anything. We're a public university and have to be very open with everything. So, my issue is with a closed process (on their part) a lack of accountability, transparency and authority (key things to us Univ folks) and technical errors that they don't address. Example: I pointed out that they list "hybrids" as "alternative fuel vehicles." We have many hybrids on our campus (mostly Toyotas) but I'm an expert in alt fuels and air pollution (that's where I come from) and these vehicles are petroleum powered. What's alternative about that? Yes, they are very efficient petroleum powered, but still, the fuel is 100% petro. When I pointed this out the answer was, in essence, "yet, but we want to give people credit for using hybrids." Great, but then list that separately. When you list them with alt fuel veh, you either give people who don't know better the idea they are alt fuel or you make yourself look uneducated, IMHO.
I could go on... I'm interested what other schools have to say....
Regards,
--John

Oct 13 2009

Sustainability Education is absent from the report card

Submitted by Dina El-Mogazi on October 13, 2009 - 7:59am.

Hello everyone,

Several days ago I sent this message to SEI and received a sympathetic response. I thought I'd post it here also in case others feel the same way, or wish to comment on this subject:

"I received my copy of the new SEI report card today, and I truly appreciate the tremendous amount of work that went into the document. It provides a very helpful resource for those of us who are dedicated to modeling sustainable practices for our students, and it also provides a great tool for negotiating sustainable policies with university administrators.

I do, however, have strong feelings regarding the omission of one particularly important category in the document, and that is sustainability education. Education is the most central function of any college or university, and arguably has the greatest impact of all sustainability related activities, as it serves to shape the awareness and understanding of our future leaders. Yet there has been no acknowledgement of sustainability education in the report card. This would be analogous to a report card for businesses which focused on financial and operational practices but failed to evaluate the products those businesses produce.

As a sustainability professional, a large portion of my efforts are focused on the educational opportunities of Bucknell students, such as sustainability across the curriculum, experiential learning, green demonstration projects, degree programs, and others. To have one of the primary college sustainability rating systems overlook those efforts is quite discouraging. I do hope you will consider adding sustainability education into your surveys in future years and weighting these efforts appropriately."

Oct 22 2009

Extracurricular Initiatives

Submitted by Samantha Given-De... on October 22, 2009 - 5:51pm.

That's a really valid point, Dina. Education empowers students to take initiative. The context of sustainability when handed to students on a classroom level encourages them to take it upon themselves to make the campus sustainable instead of waiting on the institution to make moves towards what it sees best fit for the college. Projects that come out of the student body benefit the college and give the student hands on experience with leadership and project management. Most importantly, upon graduation, the student enters the workforce with experience as an environmental steward, more equipped to be an agent of environmental progress than the average student that cares about sustainability but has no entrepreneurial experience to translate awareness into action.

Take, for example, the Northwestern Sustainability Fund, (http://northwesternsustainabilityfund.com/index.htm) a student led organization that strives to empower members of the Northwestern community to take ownership of their environmental impact by providing resources for collaborative projects that increase sustainability at the university. NSF aims to increase campus sustainability by doing things like a competition that makes the fraternities and sororities at Northwestern compete to be the most environmentally sustainable. It's long term goal is to implement one large renewable energy project. NSF was incubated by Sparkseed (www.sparkseed.org), a non-profit organization that provides seed money, mentorship, and pro-bono consulting to college aged social entrepreneurs.

I believe that sustainability education is the major promoter of this type of extracurricular student behavior--that academic ambitions combined with career goals yields the activity campuses need to be more sustainable. 
 

Nov 9 2009

Inclusion

Submitted by Paul Montgomery on November 9, 2009 - 4:16pm.

Does anyone know the logic behind only including schools with large endowments in the research?

Mar 24 2010

The Sustainable Endowments

Submitted by Julian Dautremont... on March 24, 2010 - 9:19am.

The Sustainable Endowments Institute, the organization that produces the College Sustainability Report Card, started as an organization dedicated to socially and environmentally responsible management of campus endowments.  The original goal of the Report Card is encourage campuses to do more this regard by highlighting the relative neglect of investment issues in comparison to operational sustainability.  That's why issues related to endowment sustainability -  endowment transparency, investment priorities, and shareholder engagement - make up such a significant portion of a school's overall grade (a third in recent years). 

The focus on schools with the largest endowments flows logically from the primary focus on investment issues.  The schools include in the 2010 edition already represent 95% of total campous endowment holdings.  I'd imagine that from SEI's perspective the benefits of including the last 5% of endowments are outweighed by the costs of doing so. 

It's worth noting that in the last year, SEI did allow schools with smaller endowments to get graded for a fee and 32 schools took them up on the offer.  It is of course rather regressive to charge the poorest schools a fee while doing it free for the richest schools, but it is possible to at least rationalize this approach when you keep SEI's primary interest in mind.