The College of St. Benedict/St. John's University
Contact Information
Education and Research:
CSB/SJU have developed a strong Environmental Studies Program, built upon an interdisciplinary major delivered by an independent department with four tenure-track faculty lines, including a climate scientist joining the department in fall 2009. The ES department supports a vibrant undergraduate research program that originated with a grant from the NCUR/Lancy Foundation in 2000-2003; today all ES majors complete a thesis project and the department's reseach endowment supports multiple full-time student-faculty research projects each summer. In 2008 student research fellows conducted the greenhouse gas audits of both campuses as part of our ACUPCC planning process.
Environmental engagement is extended to the surrounding community through the work of the St. John's Arboretum, whose primary responsibliity is managing over 2,500 acres of land at St. John's University in a sustainable fashion and conducting educational programs for K-12 children and offering additional educational opportunities for adult community members. Over 6,000 K-12 students from local school districts visit the Arboretum annually as part of their science education, using curriculur materials produced for the teachers by our environmental education fellows. Hundreds of additional community members attend events like the annual Maple Syrup Festival, Owl Hoots, and birding walks that are offered by aboretum staff and CSB/SJU faculty. The Arboretum's extensive forest is one of the few university forests in the US to be certified sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC); lumber produced on campus is crafted into furniture and art in the campus woodshop as well.
CSB/SJU are also the founders of the Upper Midwest Association for Campus Sustainability (www.umacs.org), an organization created in 2005 to support colleges in the region that are working to become more sustainable. CSB/SJU faculty concieved the organization, won grant funding to get it started, and provided admistrative and technical support from 2005-2009, when UMACS administration was handed off to a broader steering committee from around the region. UMACS has hosted two successful biennial conferences (with another planned in 2010) in addition to a variety of smaller workshops on a variety of topics. In July 2009 UMACS will host a workshop on climate action planning at Macalester College.
Campus Operations:
The College of St. Benedict (CSB) and St. John's University (SJU) operate a joint academic program-- and are joint members of AASHE --but maintain separate physical campuses five miles apart. Accordingly, campus operations are largely separate, except for transportation. The operations highlights are as follows: CSB: President Baenninger is a charter signatory of the ACUPCC and a member of the Leadership Circle. The college completed its greenhouse gas audit in 2008 and is on target to submit its first climate action plan in September 2009. As part of the ACUPCC process the president established the College Sustainability Council, which advises the president on sustainability issues and drafts sustainability policy for the college. Among the results of the committee's first 18 months of operation were the decision to construct a campus health center in unfinished space below a residence hall (rather than building new), a comittment to green building in all new construction (including a major new academic building now in the preliminary design phase), an external audit of our recycling program, an external review of our power plant and energy management systems, a review of our landscape design standards, and exploration of alternatives meeting our campus energy and transportation needs. In 2009 the committee secured funding for a full-time sustainability fellowship position that will begin in the fall. SJU: The late President Dietrich Reinhart was also a charter ACUPCC signatory. As a result of his action a Climate Action Committee was established in 2008, building on an existing "energy comitttee," to further coordinate campus sustainability efforts. The committee oversaw the greenhouse gas auditing process in 2008 and is currently drafting the climate action plan due this fall. Among other projects underway or recently completed are the installation of a 3.5kW solar PV array on the New Science Building, the construction of a LEED-silver community center to be commissioned in August 2009, and several extensive feasibility studies including one on wind power, one on commercial-scale solar PV, one on biomass as an alternative to coal for our cogen plant, and a fourthon using deep lake water for cooling in the summers. St. John's has also managed a major Arboretum, as noted above, since 1998. CSB/SJU also jointly operation "The Link," a bussing system that moves approximately 5,000 riders between the two campuses (about five miles each way) seven days a week, reducing private automobile traffic dramatically.
Administration and Finance:
As members of the STARS pilot project CSB/SJU have collected extensive information about our administration and finance policies and procedures. We also engaged in extensive debates about how (and whether) these policies related to our broader sustainability objectives. As Catholic institutions we have long had responsible investment policies and have developed human resource policies that are employee and family friendly. Our missions have explicitly included a call to increase the diversity of our student body (and faculty) for many years and substantial progress has been made on both fronts. That said, few of our current policies are direct results of our campus sustainability work, but rather are based on long-held values that are central to our institutional identities. These policies are all being reviewed as a result of the STARS pilot and we anticipate significant changes will be made over the next several years. Because no major changes have been made to date as a result of our sustainability engagement we will not detail these policies in this application.
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