Claiming a Seat: Values in Action on AASHE’s 20th Anniversary
By: Julian Keniry
Celebrating the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) on its 20th Anniversary is a heartening and hopeful occasion. For two decades, AASHE has helped colleges and universities embody sustainability in their culture, operations, and teaching, sustained by the inspiration of tens of thousands of humble practitioners and courageous visionaries alike.
With the passing last week of one of the Greensboro Four, Major General Joseph A. McNeil, I was reflecting on a story that has been part of my awareness since girlhood. It connects to the metaphor of taking a seat at the table, which is what higher education sustainability leaders try to do every day. While in Greensboro, NC, to commemorate a UNCG colleague, Dr. Sarah Praskievicz, a hydrologist, riparian ecologist, and active community participant, I was also able to brush up on the facts about the Greensboro Four near the International Museum in their honor.
In February 1960, McNeil, together with Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. (later Jibreel Khazan), and David Richmond, sat at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, where the staff withheld a meal and denied their right to service. By taking their seats at the counter, McNeil and his fellow students created opportunities for many others and set an example for groups like AASHE.
Claiming a seat and sharing meals are practices campus sustainability leaders embrace every day. I remember longtime AASHE advocate and co-founder, Harold Glasser, sharing stories about how important it was for the faculty and staff at Western Michigan University to enjoy meals together, to move beyond the transactional toward the more relational. Even sustainability revolutionaries need good food and better conversation to change the world.
Whether for academic, operational, or community planning, campus sustainability leaders must often not only find and secure seats but also create them. Assuming those rightful places, in turn, opens opportunities for students, staff, and successive generations.
We often picture faculty or students securing a seat at the operational or strategic table. The direction goes the other way as well, as early founders such as Walter Simpson, who served as UB’s energy officer, took a seat at the teaching table, co-lecturing alongside faculty. Kurt Teichert of Brown University maintained seats in both the utilities and academic divisions for many years until he had so much standing there and in the campus recycling and sustainability communities that a literal seat was no longer necessary.
AASHE’s first 20 years have illustrated, through nearly 1,000 case studies among many other efforts, how higher education can bring sustainability to life in practice, creating many new seats across departments. One of the exciting opportunities over the next decades is making sure students can carry these applied sustainability practices and values into their communities and professional lives.
Our challenge is partly connecting students with existing “green jobs” and partly reimagining what dignified, meaningful careers and lives can be. Employers see part of the picture. Many customers, employers, and shareholders know sustainability can reduce risk, cut waste, conserve resources, and protect health. But they don’t have all the answers, especially amid automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. With help from organizations such as AASHE, the skills that balance the human-built and broader natural worlds will help us channel advanced technologies for good.
Teachers have an even more central role across this rebalancing work than we may have appreciated by weaving sustainability into every discipline. In studies I led with NWF and PSRAI, we found significant gaps, particularly in the health sciences, business, education, and engineering. Recent LinkedIn studies concur.
As we move toward AASHE’s 25th, 30th, and 50th anniversaries and beyond, Major General McNeil’s example reminds us to persevere in securing our rightful seats. His peaceful act planted a seed of possibility that grows each time a teacher helps a student see a seat they can claim or create, connecting with their values, earning a dignified livelihood, and safeguarding the Earth’s living systems.