In this week's "Brainstorm,"  The Chronicle Review blog, Stan Katz offers a thoughtful critique of Mark Taylor's op-ed in the April 27th issue of the NY Times (see previous blog entry). His main criticism is that Taylor only offers a grocery list of suggested reforms, many of which are old ideas and don't hang together. Fair enough. From my perspective, though, one of the readers who writes in support of Taylor makes the most salient point:

"I think Taylor is spot-on in terms of restructuring the curriculum— particularly as it relates to more integration and less disciplinary “silos.” As inter and multi disciplinary programs increase, colleges and universities are being stretched to meet the new demands (e.g. environmental sciences/studies).

With crises (like climate change) come opportunities to re-imagine teaching and learning in higher education. The current general education model is woefully inadequate and amounts to a “checkbox” caricature of the liberal arts.

Tomorrow’s students need to be systems-thinkers (and doers). From my seat, I worry that we are driving around in the higher education equivalent of a Chevy Nova. It’s time to imagine if things were otherwise."

        

From Peter Senge's The Necessary Revolution: "Occasionally something different happens, a collective awakening to new possibilities that changes everything over time -- how people see the world, what they value, how society defines progress and organizes itself, and how institutions operate."  In Boldly Sustainable: Hope and Opportunity for Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change, released last month, Andrea Putman and I explore the potential of the sustainability revolution to transform higher education.

I think a lot of us are ready for big changes in higher ed.  See Mark Taylor's recent op-ed in the New York Times, "End the University as We Know It."  Despite these calls for change, of course, there is always the chance that higher ed will end up becoming what Putman and I call "the intellectual equivalent of Easter Island": a place we pay a lot of money to visit and then leave -- in the end, the encounter doesn't have much impact except to remind us how isolated the place is from the rest of the world. The university either becomes the engine driving us into a sustainable future or it becomes a curiosity/exotic luxury. Nothing in between. The rest of us will move to the Web or create new learning communities. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive options; indeed, for some people, they are one and the same.

        

I was a guest blogger for the Chronicle of Higher Education last month.  You can find my third and final post here:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/architecture/2480/guest-blogger-spending-endowment-money-to-benefit-all

Last week’s release of the College Sustainability Report Card 2009 raises an important question: What does it mean for higher education to adopt sustainability as a core financial strategy?

As Andrea Putman and I discuss in our forthcoming book, Boldly Sustainable: Hope and Opportunity for Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change, a commitment to sustainability can both maximize benefits and minimize risks. It can lead to a more efficient use of limited resources, higher productivity, and the development of distributed leadership on campus. It can create greater collaboration across organizational silos, strengthen trust with external stakeholders, and enhance a college’s brand value, making it easier to recruit outstanding students and faculty and staff members and retain them. All of this can produce a significant competitive advantage for the institution.

Just as important, adopting sustainability as a core financial strategy means taking a broader approach to investment. Higher education, if it intends to take its own long-term sustainability seriously, needs to focus on how increases in endowment spending can improve the well-being of society and the environment.

Why?

It’s pretty simple, actually. Colleges and universities can only thrive if society and the biosphere are healthy. Any college or university that is so shortsighted as to pursue its ends without taking into account the interests of the larger community or ecosystem will not thrive over the long haul. In the end, it will find itself forced, one way or the other, to deal with the fact that its future is inextricably linked to that of the larger web of social and ecological relations in which it is embedded. It is recognition of this interdependence, for example, that has driven Yale University to invest in the City of New Haven and Berea College to invest in the land and people of the South.

College and university endowments, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, could be a powerful force for social and environmental good even as these institutions pursue their own self interest. Yet only 35 percent of the institutions surveyed in the College Sustainability Report Card 2009 invest in renewable energy and only 10 percent in community-development funds.

If everyone is to have a chance at a healthy future, higher-education institutions must embrace a larger understanding of their mission and not confine themselves simply to growing their endowments while the communities around them come unraveled and the degradation of the environment continues unabated.

One of the best ways that a university can have a positive effect on the environment and local economy is to set aside a proportion of its endowment to use as a revolving loan fund for cities and towns to use in communitywide energy-efficiency retrofits. Such loans have the potential for returns on investment as good as anything in the financial markets today. (Of course, considering the state of Wall Street, that’s not saying much.)

In making such investments, a university can not only help reduce the carbon footprint of its communities, but also keep dollars from flowing out of the community and into the pockets of the utility companies. These dollars will recirculate in the community, increasing spending and indirectly contributing to the creation of new jobs. And, as Van Jones points out, investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy also directly create new green-collar jobs that can provide much-needed economic stability during even the toughest of recessions.

Given the latest economic forecasts, it’s an idea worth considering.

        

I'm guest blogging for the Chronicle of Higher Education this month.  You can find my second post from last week here:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/architecture/2451/guest-blogger-code-green-for-higher-education

Tom Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America, is an impassioned plea for what he calls “Code Green” — a strategy for clean energy, energy efficiency, and conservation that would address global climate change and sustainability while also renewing the spirit of innovation and idealism in the U.S.

So what would “Code Green” mean for higher education? As the National Wildlife Federation’s report on campus sustainability noted last month, the record for colleges and universities is mixed. The survey of 1,068 institutions found that real headway had been made in the areas of research, campus operations, and community outreach, but it revealed much less success in greening the classroom.

Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that most colleges and universities are treating sustainability either as a fad or as one more thing to stir into the mix, rather than as a transformative process. A good sign — perhaps the best one — that an institution is taking sustainability seriously is when it begins to integrate sustainability across the curriculum. That’s the heart of the matter, after all.

Frank Rhodes, former president of Cornell University, suggests that the concept of sustainability offers “a new foundation for the liberal arts and sciences.” It provides a new focus, sense of urgency, and curricular coherence at a time of drift, fragmentation, and insularity in higher education, what he calls “a new kind of global map.”

At the same time, though, Rhodes notes that the “broad range of questions that sustainability raises have no single set of answers.” Experimentation, discovery, and exploration, rather than dogma and indoctrination, are the keys to mining its value as a way to frame the crucial issues of our time.

“Code Green” can provide a vital source of hope and opportunity for facilitating institutional renewal and revitalizing higher education’s sense of mission. Growing out of a keen awareness that the economy, society, and environment are closely intertwined, sustainability fosters a culture of innovation, creativity, and holistic thinking. It provides a way to bring fresh thinking to bear on old problems and identifies new solutions that can move higher education forward even as it better prepares students to be engaged citizens, active leaders, and successful professionals.

Embracing Tom Friedman’s call for “Code Green” in higher education would mean adopting it as a core strategy. As Andrea Putman and I argue in our forthcoming book, Boldly Sustainable: Hope and Opportunity for Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change, it would mean not viewing sustainability as marginal to the real business of colleges and universities or as an “add on.” Instead, sustainability would be seen as the central organizing principle in an intellectual, social, and financial sense. And it would be recognized that these three strands cannot be unraveled and separated out, one from the other, without undermining the capacity of higher education to be an effective force in 21st-century democratic society.

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas,” John Maynard Keynes wrote, “but in escaping from the old ones.” By letting go of ideas that have outlived their usefulness, we clear the space for fresh perspectives to emerge. By reaching out to develop partnerships with business and government, colleges and universities — more than any other institutions in our society — can generate the intellectual, social, and financial capital necessary to escape the gravitational pull of the old, dysfunctional ideas and behaviors that have brought us to our current impasse. It is colleges and universities that can launch us toward a new world of hope and opportunity.

In the current age of climate change, the need for such transformational leadership has never been greater.

        

Wow, after several weeks of meetings and interviews, the SUNY Board of Trustees approved our charter application for New Roots School yesterday.  Here's the article from this morning's Ithaca Journal:

September 17, 2008 SUNY board approves New Roots school By Liz Lawyer Journal Staff A new charter school is scheduled to open in Ithaca in fall of 2009. The State University of New York Board of Trustees on Tuesday approved the application to open New Roots Charter School. The next step for the application is review by the state Board of Regents, although their decision will not have bearing on whether the charter is granted, said Tina Nilsen-Hodges, primary applicant for New Roots. Nilsen-Hodges said she is confident the application for New Roots meets the Board of Regents' criteria, but even if they refuse their approval the charter will become effective after 30 days. The SUNY board accepted seven applications for school charters from across the state, including five in the boroughs of New York City, one in Hempstead, and the one in Ithaca. “We are very excited by the Trustees' vote of confidence in New Roots,” said Jason Hamilton, chairman of the proposed New Roots Board of Trustees. “Now the hard work to launch the school begins.” The school will be officially incorporated no sooner than 90 days from now, and no later than early March, Nilsen-Hodges said. Nilsen-Hodges said the New Roots Board of Trustees now will be able to enter into more serious discussions about finding a place to house the school, selecting a principal and hiring staff. The first thing they will do is organize focus groups with parents and prospective students and other members of the community, she said. “We as a team are most interested in developing community engagement in the planning process,” she said. “We are building a school from the ground up. We want to meet the needs of the people we will be serving.” Nilsen-Hodges said the information in the application will provide a framework for the discussions and planning within the board and with the community to build on. Nilsen-Hodges intends to apply to be the principal and she is the only applicant, she said. She also has two sons, ages 11 and 13, who might apply for enrollment in the school, she said. She also said that during the interview process the Charter Schools Institute asked the proposed board members whether they would be able to fire Nilsen-Hodges, even though she was instrumental in the creation of the school. “The answer was, ‘Absolutely,' ” she said. But Nilsen-Hodges said she did not anticipate that would be necessary. “My training gives me confidence this is something I can do and do well,” she said. “Tina is uniquely qualified to take on the responsibilities associated with being the founding principal of New Roots,” said Peter Bardaglio, vice chairman of the proposed school board and former provost and vice president for academic affairs at Ithaca College. “She has 16 years of teaching experience, is a New York state certified teacher, and has received her New York State School Building Leader Initial Certificate. At the same time, it is important to remember that her work as founding principal will be subject to regular, ongoing performance evaluations. New Roots board members will expect Tina to meet the rigorous standards associated with the position of New Roots principal.” The Board of Education of the Ithaca City School District has expressed concern that the charter school would be too much of a financial burden for the district. New Roots would be entitled to $12,476 per student, equaling about $1,559,549 in the 2009-10 school year, or 1.58 percent of the district's budget. In the fifth year, accounting for increased cost of tuition, higher enrollment in the charter school, and the district's growing budget, the school would get $14,042 per child, adding up to $3,159,515, or 2.85 percent of the budget. The Charter Schools Institute said they conducted a “rigorous review” of the application, both from an educational and financial standpoint, and found the school to be viable. In the first year, the school would enroll up to 125 ninth and 10th graders. At maximum enrollment the school would take 225 students in grades nine through 12. Nilsen-Hodges said the board is considering a downtown campus, possibly with multiple buildings, to give students a chance to interact with the community more and have access to internships and community service projects.

        

I'm guest blogging for the Chronicle of Higher Education this month.  You can find my first post from last week here:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/architecture/2425/guest-blogger-pond-scum-and-other-miracles-of-science

I don’t know about you, but thinking about climate change makes my head hurt. It’s just soooo complicated.

The whole carbon-footprint thing, for example. Is it better to eat a non-organic, local tomato than an organic one from Florida? Should I drive with the windows down and the a/c off above 50 mph? What about eating with a compostable fork and knife? Shouldn’t that corn be used to feed people instead?

You know the drill.

It’s bad enough that, thanks to global warming, all those beetles are chewing through trees in Alaska and the rest of western North America faster than Sarah Palin can mow down caribou with her AK-47. It turns out that the beetles are not only killing trees; they’re releasing tons of carbon at the same time. Something like 990 megatons in British Columbia alone over the next two decades.

Then we find out that methane is 20 times worse than carbon dioxide. Great. So let’s see: The permafrost holding up those trees in Alaska is thawing out, releasing enormous amounts of methane that’s been locked up for the past 11,000 years into the atmosphere, while thousands and thousands of dead trees are tipping over like guys at a Friday night kegger.

No wonder the governor wanted to get out of Wasilla and hit the campaign trail with McCain.

And then the good folks at Woods Hole tell us it’s nitrogen that we really have to worry about. Whose idea of a bad joke is this, anyways?

First it was carbon. Then it was methane. Now it’s nitrogen. Oh, and guess what? Tons and tons and tons of nitrogen are being released from … that’s right: the thawing permafrost.

As Gail Collins might put it, “There has been a lot of that going around this year, people.”

But not to worry. Just when it looks like all is lost, word comes from the University of Virginia that pond scum might be our salvation.

Pond scum. Algae. You know, the green stuff that floats on top when fertilizer runs off into the pond. The stuff that blooms like Mao’s hundred flowers when water has too much nitrogen. Which, of course, is the major ingredient in fertilizer.

According to the Charlottesville research team, algae can generate 15 times more oil per acre than other plants used for biofuel, such as corn or switchgrass. Take that, T. Boone Pickens. Who needs your wind plan? And I’m not making this up: Pond scum gobbles up carbon dioxide by the truckload at the same time. That’s called photosynthesis, remember?

So does that mean all we have to worry about is methane? Where’s Dave Barry when you need him?

        

Terrific news from Ithaca College two days ago as the School of Business received official word from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) that its new facility has been certified LEED Platinum. That makes it the first Business School building anywhere to meet the Platinum standard, the highest of all the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) categories. LEED is a voluntary rating system for developing high-performance, sustainable buildings. There are less than 100 buildings in the world that have received this designation, with fewer than a dozen of them situated on American college campuses.

This was a particularly gratifying moment for me because I helped launch the project as provost at IC from 2002 to 2007. Susan West Engelkemeyer, the B-School dean at IC, did an outstanding job overseeing the completion of the cutting edge facility, one of her many accomplishments since coming to Ithaca in 2005. As she points out, “This project allows the school to clearly demonstrate the triple bottom line of people, planet, and prosperity."

Dorothy D. Park, the president of the Park Foundation, contributed the lead gift of $10 million toward the $19 million effort. Robert A.M. Stern Architects designed the 38,800-square-foot facility, which opened in January, and Atelier Ten served as the environmental design consultant.

Among the features of the Park Center for Business and Sustainable Enterprise that reduce the building’s overall carbon footprint are:

• A vegetated roof to help control wastewater runoff and provide a thermal cushion against significant temperature fluctuation.
• Heat and light from a multistory, south-facing wall of glass to dramatically reduce energy consumption.
• Extensive use of natural lighting throughout the building, minimizing energy needs.
• A white roof to reduce heat load in the building.
• Purchase of 50 percent of the electricity used for the building from renewable sources.
• A storm water reclamation system for use with the building’s plumbing.
• A physical environment intentionally created to encourage a sense of community, shared purpose and collaboration.

Even as the building was going up, Dean Engelkemeyer and the B-School faculty began discussions about how to revise the curriculum so that undergraduates and MBAs can acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to address the challenges of sustainability and corporate social responsibility that will face them after graduation.  According to Engelkemeyer, the dynamic design of the new building "provided the energy, inspiration, and opportunity to push a very good curriculum to become truly great."

I'll never forget sitting with Mrs. Park and her daughter Adelaide Gomer at her home in Ithaca when she made the decision to make her generous gift, which came out of her own pocket rather than the foundation, one of the most progressive philanthropic endeavors in the country. She looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and said, "This will put that little college on the map, won't it?" Well, Dottie, that's right and it wouldn't have happened without you. Congratulations to you and Ithaca College for a job well done!

        

As a former long-time resident of Baltimore, it's been a real treat to watch Michael Phelps blow out the competition at the Beijing Olympics. Bawl-mere officials are planning a big hometown celebration for Phelps when he returns, as well they should.

This guy's performance has been phenomenal. Reporter Karen Crouse points out in yesterday's New York Times that, as of Sunday morning, "the Person’s Republic of Michael would have ranked fourth in gold medals and been ahead of all but 14 countries in the medal count."

The U.S. is five medals ahead of China at this point (67-52), thanks in no small part to Phelps's history-making aquatic victories. In another department, however, the U.S. is lagging behind China. And it involves an issue that is a heckuva lot more important than the Olympics: the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Rather than getting bogged down in futile efforts to maintain the old fossil-fuel regime, a report published earlier this month by The Climate Group shows, China is seizing the opportunity to create a new energy economy. Already the world's leading renewable energy producer in terms of installed capacity, China is planning to double the proportion of renewable energy to 15 percent by 2020. At present second only to Japan in the production of solar photovoltaic technology, by the end of next year it will be the world's leading manufacturer of wind turbines. According to the report, China is also emerging as a frontrunner in the export of solar water heaters, energy efficient home applicances, and rechargeable batteries.

Of course, China is now the world's leading producer of greenhouse gas, accounting for 24 percent of all global emissions. The good news is that its CO2 per capita is relatively low. The bad news is that should the Chinese ever reach the current per capita level of Americans, as The Climate Group observes, their "total emissions would be roughly equivalent to the entire planet today." Yikes.

All the more reason to cheer on China's move to a low carbon economy. And all the more reason to ask why Congress cannot find the political will to extend the investment tax credits for installing solar energy and the production tax credits for building wind turbines. Both of these are slated to end in December and, as a result of Congressional bickering that has gone on for more than a year, time is running out.

“Leadership is about ‘follow me’ not ‘after you,’” Thomas Friedman has written in another context. It's about time we took a page out of Michael Phelps's book and exercised some leadership, putting in place a strong, comprehensive renewable energy policy. Extending the federal tax credits, which have been a key component in stimulating the development of the U.S. solar and wind power industries, would be a good way to get started.

        

A friend of mine sent me a link the other day to an interesting piece by "No Impact Man" claiming that being optimistic "is the most radical political act there is." Although the entry was posted last August, it related directly to a conversation we'd been having a couple of days earlier and I was glad to read it because it got me thinking about how I see the world.

I prefer to think of myself as hopeful and pragmatic rather than optimistic and idealistic. I agree with "No Impact Man" that "realistic" is a term that shuts down conversation rather than keeps the discussion going. As an historian, however, it's hard for me to be "optimistic" in the narrow sense.  The historical record is too full of stories about the awful things people have done to each other over the ages. I have difficulty believing in the unqualified "goodness of people," to use the language of "No Impact Man," and think that one of the problems of many left-leaning proposals for reform is that they fail to take into account the presence of evil in the world.  

(I should mention at this point that I just got scammed on eBay to the tune of $1,200 in spite of being a relatively experienced operator in this venue. I also spent an hour this evening working with PayPal security on an investigation into an unauthorized payment of $245 out of my personal checking account. So I'm a little sensitive right now on the question of humankind's goodness.)

At the same time, it is too easy to avoid dealing with the struggle between good and evil that resides in each of us by externalizing it and portraying evil as something that only exists outside of us. One of the real dangers of a lot of rightwing thinking is the extent to which it portrays the world as a struggle between the forces of light and the forces of dark, setting up a simplistic dynamic that papers over the complex mix of motives that often drives human behavior.

In any event, I am a hopeful person (as opposed to being optimistic) in the sense that I believe human beings have the ability to wrestle with the struggle between good and evil that resides in each of us and find a way to do what is in the common good a lot of the time, if not most of it.

When it comes to the question of idealism vs. pragmatism, I definitely come down on the side of the latter. Not in the sense of readily sacrificing my core values to achieve a desired result, but rather as a way to move forward based on these values. Too often, at least in my experience, idealists get so caught up in trying to figure out how to maintain their moral purity that they fail to act and do more damage as a result of this paralysis than they would if they had the courage to make the best possible decision based on limited but sufficient knowledge.

I find Williams James’s understanding of pragmatism to be particularly compelling. Pragmatism, writes James, "appears less as a solution … than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.” In his formulation, pragmatism does not adhere blindly to theory as an end in and of itself, but rather puts theory to work in the search for solutions. “Grant an idea or belief to be true,” he asks, “what concrete differences will its being true make in anyone’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false?” These questions seem especially pertinent to the conversation about sustainability. It seems far more important to me to see sustainability in terms of its practical consequences rather than getting bogged down in what course of action is most consistent with some abstract ideal. In light of the pressing challenges posed by peak oil and climate change, spending too much time and energy worrying about being absolutely correct or scoring points is a form of self-indulgence we cannot afford.

And, yes, I sure would like to get my money back ...

        

Together two major breakthroughs announced recently at MIT hold out the promise of launching a solar revolution. I know, we've all heard that before. But this might just be the real deal.

The first development, made public about two weeks ago, involves turning windows into solar concentrators that can help power the buildings in which they are located. Light is collected from across the window and then gathered at the edges by solar cells. MIT engineers report that focusing the light in this way increases the electrical power generated by each cell "by a factor of over 40."

Wow. How do they do it? The research team, headed up by associate professor of electrical engineering Dr. Marc Baldo, has come up with an ingenious method of concentrating solar energy by applying a blend of two or more dyes to the pane of glass. The dyes combine to absorb light across many different wavelengths, sending it at a new wavelength across the window pane to solar cells at the edges.

And, as if that's not amazing enough, this system can be installed on existing solar panel systems to increase their efficiency by 50% at "minimal additional cost."

The MIT team is looking to bring this innovation to market within three years. If successful, it would obviously have a dramatic impact on the cost of solar electricity.

The second breakthrough made headlines today in the Boston Globe. The primary obstacle to solar power becoming mainstream has been finding a way to store it economically for the days when the sun doesn't show up for work. Until now, doing so has been both inefficient and costly.

Well, it looks like those days might be gone with the wind, so to speak. In the August 1st issue of Science, another MIT team describes a simple, inexpensive, and very efficient method for storing solar energy that uses natural materials and is inspired by the process of photosynthesis.

"Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution," observes Dr. Daniel Nocera, he Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of the paper. "Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon."

Holy atomic pile, Batman! We might have a way to produce solar energy and store it cost effectively? And we might be able to use this same fuel cell to store wind energy more affordably? Whoa. Does this mean that Al Gore's call for all electricity in the U.S. to be produced by clean technology in ten years, so gleefully pilloried by the coal and oil industry and their supporters, might actually be achievable?

Nocera and his research collaborator, Dr. Matthew Kanan, have developed a low tech process to use the sun's (or wind's) energy for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. The oxygen and hydrogen can then be recombined inside a fuel cell, producing carbon-free electricity to power your house or electric car 24/7.

You can learn more about the details of this process on the MIT web site. Suffice it to say here that this new technique reproduces the water splitting reaction that takes place during photosynthesis, operating at room temperature and in neutral pH water in an easily assembled system.

According to Dr. James Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London, "This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind." If Nocera and Kanan can pull this off, it'll not only have the anti-Gore climate skeptics gnawing on their paws, it'll also drive the paleo-greens up a tree.

Here's to a bright green future where instead of wearing hair shirts and a crown of thorns, in Alex Steffen's words, we can build a world "in which technology, design, smart incentives, and wise policies make it possible to deliver a high quality of life at lower ecological cost."