Higher Education

Campus-Community Collaboration in the Age of Climate Distruption

/ Peter Bardaglio / Leave a comment

Few institutions are better positioned to provide the leadership required to avoid runaway climate change than higher education. Indeed, it is hard to see where else the necessary leadership will come from if universities and colleges don’t step up to take on this responsibility. Not just any kind of leadership will do the trick, however. It must be collaborative, adopting an ethos of cooperation and mutuality rather than top-down hierarchical structuring.

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Cornell University

Universities and colleges in the United States historically have been crucibles of social change and laboratories for new ideas and creative solutions to some of society’s toughest problems. What is new is the scale of the problem and the threat it poses to human civilization. Simply providing models of sustainability on campus will not suffice. Universities and colleges can become truly sustainable only if they adopt the perspective of “ecosystem awareness” and work with the communities around them to become sustainable. They must commit to dramatically reducing the carbon footprint of campuses and become examples of ecological integrity, social justice and economic health. Beyond that, they must collaborate with the larger community and, in so doing, enable solutions to be scaled up and replicated.

As Michael Young, president of the University of Washington, argues, higher education must go beyond greening the campus. “For colleges and universities — especially public ones — engaging with our communities is fundamental to our mission,” he said. “We all have a responsibility to turn our universities inside out — that is, to take the wealth of ideas percolating on our campuses into our community, whether that community is across the street or across the globe.”

TCCPI seeks to lead the way

New York’s Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative (TCCPI), at which I am a coordinator, was inspired in particular by similar efforts in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Oberlin, Ohio. It seeks to demonstrate what this kind of collaboration looks like and the impact it can have on a region’s economic, social and environmental health. With a population of about 100,000, Tompkins County includes three American College and University President Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) signatories (which also happen to be among the top employers in the county): Cornell University, Ithaca College and Tompkins Cortland Community College. In addition, the city of Ithaca, the towns of Ithaca, Caroline and Danby and the county all have made formal commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with the county calling for a decrease in emissions of 80 percent by 2050 and establishing an interim goal of 20 percent by 2020.

TCCPI has leveraged these climate action commitments to help mobilize a countywide energy efficiency effort, expand the production of renewable energy and accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy. The coalition, launched in June 2008, currently consists of local leaders from more than 40 organizations, institutions and businesses in the county, organized into five sectors: business, education, local government, nonprofit and youth. Each sector has a representative serving on the steering committee, which tracks the progress of the coalition’s projects and sets the agenda for the group’s monthly meetings.

The most immediate way in which TCCPI has adopted a collaborative model of leadership and sought to be a “leader-as-host” is to provide an ongoing forum where local leaders can come together regularly, share their progress and challenges and brainstorm collectively about ideas and solutions. In some cases, it’s hard to imagine how the outcomes resulting from these meetings would have emerged without years of building trust and thinking collaboratively. For example, the Tompkins County Planning Department and EcoVillage at Ithaca (EVI) never had worked together in the nearly two decades since EVI was founded. Yet, at a TCCPI meeting in June 2010, the group came up with the notion of the planning department and EVI’s joining hands to submit a proposal to the EPA Climate Showcase Community Grant Program, which seeks to highlight community efforts to decrease greenhouse gas emissions.

The grant proposal, submitted the next month, outlined a strategy for disseminating to the larger community the important lessons learned at EVI about shrinking one’s carbon footprint and developing ways that the county could incorporate these key principles into its planning for future development. EPA awarded a $375,000 grant and work began in February 2011. Two model developments, one at EVI and another at a pocket neighborhood downtown, already are underway, and the county has proposed a third development near the regional medical center. All are designed to highlight innovative approaches to “creating dense neighborhoods that enhance residents’ quality of life while using fewer resources.”

Another project growing out of TCCPI discussions is the installation of photovoltaic arrays at numerous sites in the county, including several county government buildings, businesses and higher education institutions. In the area of energy efficiency, TCCPI has worked with the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County (CCETC) to support the establishment of the Tompkins County Energy Corps, made up of students from Cornell and Ithaca College who carry out informational energy audits for homeowners, share information with them about state and federal incentives and encourage concrete steps to improve their residences’ energy performance. TCCPI also has worked closely with CCETC in rolling out a countywide campaign, “Get Your Greenback Tompkins,” to raise awareness about the importance of energy savings.

In these latter two instances, TCCPI shared its own financial resources to help launch the projects. In other cases, it has lent its social capital to help projects obtain the necessary financial capital. Two original members of the TCCPI steering committee serve on the founding board of Black Oak Wind Farm, an 11.9 megawatt project just outside Ithaca slated to be in production by the summer of 2015.

The first community wind project in the region, Black Oak has raised its seed capital of $1.82 million from about 110 local investors. The TCCPI network provided a crucial resource in reaching out to many of these people and persuading them to invest in the wind farm and purchase power from it.

What’s next

TCCPI’s latest initiative marks perhaps its most important effort yet to be a “leader-as-host.” The coalition is working with downtown Ithaca property owners to form a 2030 District, a public/private partnership in which property owners and managers come together with local government, business and community leaders to provide a model for urban sustainability through collaboration, leveraged financing and shared resources. Across the country, 2030 Districts are being established to meet the energy, water and vehicle emissions targets called for by Architecture 2030 in the 2030 Challenge for Planning.

The bottom line? TCCPI embodies the next logical stage in the higher education sustainability movement. It not only promotes collaboration among the local higher education institutions, but also encourages engagement with the community at large in a democratic process. It seeks to draw together key stakeholders and engage them in a course of action that begins with discovering and making explicit common intention, and ends with collectively creating the kinds of innovation needed to effectively address intractable problems. With its emphasis on campuses and communities partnering to address climate and energy issues, TCCPI — like the Oberlin and Grand Rapids models it was based on — provides a framework for multi-sector collaboration that holds out hope of a brighter future for all. It demonstrates that job creation, energy security, more resilient communities and responsible stewardship of the environment are not mutually exclusive.

There is no silver bullet, no magic wand, which can make the immense problems confronting us go away. A necessary if not sufficient condition, though, is that we move from the old myths of independence and self-reliance and acknowledge the truths of interdependence and mutuality. In an increasingly secular world, universities and colleges are among the few institutions that have the capacity to promote this broader, long-term understanding of where the human experiment must head.

Note: This piece was orginally published by GreenBiz.com and can be found here.

TCCPI Receives Cornell Sustainability Award

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In honor of Sustainability Month, the Cornell University President’s Sustainable Campus Committee presented the second annual Partners in Sustainability Award to the Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative (TCCPI) on Friday, April 29, 2011.

The award recognizes TCCPI for its ongoing partnership in regional carbon reduction strategies. Cornell cited TCCPI as an effective partner in the regional effort to conserve energy and reduce carbon emissions. “By recognizing groups that partner with higher education institutions to advance sustainability, we build on the successes of research and teaching, and acknowledge that we must also bring together practitioners and leaders throughout the world in support new policies and practices,” Daniel Roth, Cornell University sustainability manager, said.

Cornell’s Partners in Sustainability Award is given each year to one or more recipients who have made significant contributions to the sustainable development of New York State and the Cornell campus through collaboration with Cornell University. The 2010 recipient was the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority (NYSERDA) for its leadership in statewide energy conservation and renewable energy initiatives.

Gary Stewart, director of community relations at Cornell University, wrote in an Ithaca Journal op-ed earlier this week about how collaboration among the varied members of the TCCPI coalition is at the heart of its organizational culture. As he observes, “TCCPI represents the spirit of new-era democracy, with bigger-business advocates sitting next to Snug Planet, with large-scale power generators conferring with EcoVillage, or with Tompkins County Solid Waste having the opportunity to compare notes with Museum of the Earth. TCCPI sessions are about partnerships and progress in Tompkins County.”

Partnerships are the key to building a more sustainable future. Only if we harness the power of the network will we effectively address such issues as climate destabilization and clean energy. Especially in the context of the current national and international stalemate on climate policy, it is clear that communities must take up a collaborative effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase energy efficiency, and adopt renewable energy technologies. TCCPI is honored to receive the 2011 Partners in Sustainability Award from Cornell University.

Creating New Spaces for Connecting in New Ways

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As more than one study has determined, we have the means at our disposal to move into a clean energy world in which the power of the wind, sun, water, tides, and other renewable sources is tapped and runaway climate change is averted.  The latest of these reports comes from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which earlier this month released an investigation surveying the already existing technologies that, in combination, could make this happen.  The critical missing components are the necessary policies that would drive change in this direction and the political will to implement them.

I get up every day and do the work that I do because I want to help create the public pressure and culture of collaboration that will make these changes occur.  I get up every day and do the work that I do because I believe each one of us has the responsibility to be a subject in history and not just an object of history.  I get up every day and do the work that I do because there is no silver bullet, no magic wand, that can make the immense problems confronting us go away.  The only thing that will work is to escape from the old myths of independence and self-reliance and embrace the truths of interdependence and mutuality.

Understanding these truths and harnessing the power of the network is at the heart of what makes Second Nature so effective.  The American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) and Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) are both products of this approach to change. They are collaborative efforts to create the conditions for the emergence of a new paradigm, one that involves a shift from the mechanistic, atomistic solutions of the industrial age to the organic, interconnected web of the digital age.  They are part of the largest social movement in all human history, what Paul Hawken calls “the blessed unrest.”

The overturning of the old paradigm will only happen if we intentionally and strategically create what Gibrán Rivera refers to as “the spaces for connection.”  Collaboration, inclusivity, and mutual respect make it possible for us to move upstream, where the real solutions are.  As Rivera puts it, “By re-inventing the ways in which we come together we begin to live in the world we are trying to build.”  Second Nature, together with the generous support of the Park Foundation, have provided me with the invaluable space not only for connection but also experimentation, the opportunity to reinvent myself as a social entrepreneur and explore new models of partnership and change such as the Tompkins County Climate Protection Initiative (TCCPI).  And for that I will always be grateful.

Note: This post originally appeared in Second Nature’s blog here.

A New Era in Higher Education?

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What does it mean to be “boldly sustainable” in higher education? That’s the question that my former Second Nature colleague Andrea Putman and I set out to tackle in our 2009 book on how the sustainability movement could transform colleges and universities. A revitalized sense of mission, more sustainable communities, and leadership that addresses the complex, interconnected problems of our time, both in the academy and in the world at large: these are the hallmarks of what could be a new era in higher education.

“Occasionally something different happens,” writes Peter Senge, “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.”[i] If colleges and universities can demonstrate how to cultivate a sense of collective responsibility for the good of the whole, they will not only bring about a long overdue transformation of higher education but also create the possibility of a more sustainable civilization.

Adam Joseph Lewis Center at Oberlin College

Educational institutions that ignore sustainability or treat it as one more thing to stir into the mix, rather than an approach that transforms everything, will find it increasingly difficult to compete. Sustainability should be seen as the central organizing principle, a core strategy in an intellectual, social, and cultural sense.[ii] And it should be recognized that these three strands – the intellectual, social, and cultural – can not be unraveled and separated without undermining the capacity of education to be an effective force moving forward.

Sustainability as a core intellectual, social, and cultural strategy means acknowledging that we have an opportunity and imperative to reinvent our relationship to the world, even as that world is remaking itself as a result of globalization, technological innovation, the rise of the knowledge economy, and profound demographic shifts. We can no longer think only in the short term, and we can no longer waste natural resources or take the environment for granted. We must learn to care about the needs of the global society as much as those of our local community, realizing that our families’ well-being is inextricably linked to the well-being of the planet. Sustainability, as David Orr puts it, is a “design challenge like no other” based on the proposition that “humans are embedded in a network of obligation and are kin to all life.”[iii]

A commitment to sustainability will result in a more holistic and purpose-driven education. “There are two types of education,” John Adams shrewdly noted. “One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live.” But are these two types mutually exclusive, or can we bring them together in a new synthesis? Viewed through the lens of sustainability, it quickly becomes clear that we must. Today’s students will not be able to build a more sustainable society if they are not prepared do both. They must be able to ask the important questions, grasp the big picture, and commit to an ethos of stewardship (“how to live”) at the same time that they acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and professional training to make a real difference in the world (“how to make a living”).

It is clear, in other words, that we must arm students both to dream and take action. As Orr puts it, we must “present a sense of hopefulness to students, and the competence to act on that hope.”[iv] Such an education should involve experiential, project-based learning that connects the classroom and the larger world, and it should foster whole-systems thinking that focuses on the interactions between human and natural systems.

Perhaps the most important impact that educational institutions can have on efforts to meet the challenge of climate disruption is to shift the current dominant narrative from one that emphasizes the problems and barriers to one that underscores the vast potential of human ingenuity and creativity.[v] “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas,” John Maynard Keynes observed, “but in escaping from the old ones.”[vi]

By letting go of ideas that have outlived their usefulness, we clear the space for fresh perspectives to emerge. Higher education, more than any other institution in our society, can generate the intellectual, social, and cultural capital to escape the gravitational pull of the old, dysfunctional ideas and behaviors that have brought us to our current impasse, launching us into a new world of hope and opportunity. In the current age of climate change, the need for such transformative leadership has never been greater.[vii]

Notes

This essay is adapted from Peter Bardaglio and Andrea Putman, Boldly Sustainable: Hope and Opportunity for Higher Education in the Age of Climate Change (2009). For more information about the book, click here.

[i] Peter Senge et. al., The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World (New York: Doubleday, 2008), p. 5.

[ii] Michael Crow, “American Research Universities During the Long Twilight of the Stone Age,” elaboration on remarks delivered at the Rocky Mountain Sustainability Summit, University of Colorado, Boulder, February 21, 2007, p. 3. http://president.asu.edu/files/2007_0212StoneAge.pdf.

[iii] David W. Orr, The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 10-11.

[iv] Quoted in Marci Janas, “Ancestry and Influence: A Portrait of David Orr,” September 17, 1998. http://www.oberlin.edu/news-info/98sep/orr_profile.html.

[v] William E. Easterling III, Brian H. Hurd, and Joel B. Smith, Coping with Global Climate Change: The Role of Adaptation in the United States, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, June 2004. http://www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/Adaptation.pdf.

[vi] John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, 1964), p. viii.

[vii] See Alexander Astin and Helen S. Astin, Leadership Reconsidered: Engaging Higher Education in Social Change (Battle Creek, MI: Kellogg Foundation, 2000), pp. 8-16 for an excellent discussion of the principles of transformative leadership.

Is Culture Shift Possible?

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Students and visitors walking into a residence hall at Oberlin College shouldn’t be surprised to find glowing orbs mounted on walls, changing colors throughout the day. Sound like one of the DHARMA Initiative research stations on the television show “Lost”? These orbs are part of an ongoing experiment to better understand how to encourage reduced energy consumption. The color of the “energy orbs” tells building residents how they’re doing in real time. Bright red means energy consumption is higher than average, yellow indicates things are running at about average, and green means consumption is below average.

As the Oberlin energy orbs suggest, at the heart of sustainability is the goal of moving from a culture of consumption to one of conservation. Simply greening campus operations is not enough. Moving toward sustainability hinges on our ability to inspire and maintain changes in behavior, expectations, and norms. Until people remember to turn off their computers, hop on the bus, or put their soda bottles in the recycling bin, it will be difficult to make much progress.

How one frames the message has a clear impact on how effectively it is communicated. “It’s not about telling people, ‘You have to do this, you have to do that,’” notes Oberlin College undergraduate Lucas Brown. “It’s about fitting sustainability into our own lives.” The energy orbs provide a quick, easy way to tell what the level of energy use is in the building without a lot of technical detail and in a way that motivates rather than alienates the residents. In fact, this kind of real-time feedback at Oberlin led to cuts of more than 50% in energy consumption during the experiment.

Simply put, inundating people with facts and figures can lead to paralysis. Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale University Project on Climate Change, contends that “you have to have an emotional response-bad or good-to put a high priority on doing something.” But just scaring people with apocalyptic messages about the future won’t work either. Instead, people have to be presented with concrete, positive actions; otherwise they can feel overwhelmed and powerless.

Environmental psychologist Doug McKenzie-Mohr suggests that the most effective way to promote sustainable behavior is to adopt community-based social marketing in place of the usual information-based campaigns. In his words, community-based social marketing focuses on “initiatives delivered at the community level which focus on removing barriers to an activity while simultaneously enhancing the activities’ benefits.” Community-based social marketing involves four steps: (1) identifying the barriers to a particular activity; (2) developing a strategy based on these data; (3) piloting a strategy; and (4) assessing the strategy’s success once it has been implemented across a community.

According to McKenzie-Mohr, among the most effective tools in community-based social marketing is commitment. Securing a small commitment at the outset leads to a successful larger request. Thus, asking someone to put a bumper sticker on his or her car about buying green products increases the possibility that the person will actually purchase these products.

Another important tool is the use of eye-catching prompts that remind people to turn off the lights, turn down the thermostat, or check the air pressure in their tires. In addition, norm-based messaging can be very persuasive. A 2007 study showed that giving households regular feedback on how much energy they were using relative to the rest of the group, along with a signal of social approval or disapproval (in the form of happy- or sad-face emoticons), led almost everyone to cut down on their energy consumption. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” it turns out, works as a powerful motivator in arenas other than consumer goods.

Communicating messages that are easy to remember, clear, and specific, and establishing personal and community goals are also key to successful social marketing. As part of an energy savings campaign, for example, University of Buffalo, Tufts University and Williams College urged students to “do it in the dark,” a message sure to resonate with this demographic group. Finally, the careful use of incentives that reward positive action rather than penalize negative behavior is a critical tool in moving people toward more sustainable behavior.

Clearly, attempts to change behavior and values raise a number of thorny issues. “Campuses will become sustainable only when they have universal buy-in and enthusiastic participation from all stakeholders,” observes Derek Larson, director of the Environmental Studies Program at the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University. “This requires a cultural shift that leads people to ask themselves ‘what is the most sustainable way to do this?’ before making a decision, rather than asking ‘what is the cheapest way to do this?’ or ‘how have we done this in the past?’ as is common practice at most institutions.”

The biggest question is whether a culture fueled by billions of advertising dollars and powered by decades of cheap oil and energy can change fast enough to avert disaster. Just as smoking habits have altered significantly over the last 20 years, more sustainable behaviors will probably take hold. But will they do so in time to make a difference? Although no one knows the answer to this question, the participation of colleges and universities in this effort can certainly improve our chances. What color is your campus’s energy orb?

Note: This post originally appeared on the National Wildlife Federation blog.

Rethinking Financial Sustainability in Tough Times

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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 the upside benefits and minimize the downside risks.  It can lead to a more efficient use of limited resources, higher productivity, the development of distributed leadership on campus, greater collaboration across organizational silos, strengthened trust with external stakeholders, and an enhanced brand value that makes it easier to recruit outstanding students, faculty, and staff and retain them, all of which can produce a significant competitive advantage for the institution.

Just as important, adopting sustainability as a core financial strategy means implementing 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?

Berea College in Kentucky

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 in which it is enmeshed 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 people and land of the Appalachian 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% of the institutions surveyed in the College Sustainability Report Card 2009 invest in renewable energy and only 10% in community development funds.

If a healthy future is to be evenly distributed, 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 rapid degradation of the environment continues unabated.

One of the best ways that universities can have a positive effect on the environment and local economy is for them to set aside a certain proportion of their endowments to use as a revolving loan fund for cities and towns to use in communitywide energy efficiency retrofits. These 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, universities and colleges not only can help reduce the carbon footprint of the community, 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.

Note: This post originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Building and Grounds Blog here.

Code Green for Higher Education?

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Thomas 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 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.

Note: This post originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Building and Grounds Blog here.

Sustainability Thinking and Entrepreneurship at Ithaca College

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Academic entrepreneurship, in its narrowest sense, involves the creation of new business ventures by university and college faculty, administrators, and students. More broadly, academic entrepreneurship seeks to establish connections across disciplines, between student and academic affairs, and between the campus and community. It draws on the spirit of innovation, creativity, and opportunity that animates entrepreneurial activity in the business world to provide the richest learning experience possible for students

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Ithaca College

Academic entrepreneurship has been part of Ithaca College’s institutional DNA since its founding in 1892 as a music conservatory. Ithaca, an independent, predominantly undergraduate college of 6,400 students in the Finger Lakes region of New York, offers a diverse curriculum in more than 100 degree programs in business, communications, health sciences and human performance, humanities and sciences, music, and interdisciplinary studies.  The music program’s original emphasis on performance and hands-on learning spread throughout the curriculum as the college grew and influenced other programs in theater arts, physical education, physical therapy, radio, and television.

As a founding member of Associated New American Colleges (ANAC), a national consortium of about twenty small and mid-sized institutions, Ithaca is committed to Ernest Boyer’s vision of undergraduate education, one that combines liberal and professional learning with a strong emphasis on experiential learning and civic engagement. This marriage of pragmatism and idealism equips Ithaca students with the ability to solve real world problems in ways that advance the college’s core values: intellect, character, creativity, community, and global citizenship. The recent campus-wide sustainability initiative is but the latest manifestation of Ithaca’s distinctive brand of undergraduate education.

Ithaca College has been exploring and applying the concept of sustainability for several years. Our sustainability initiative involves three dimensions: 1) the curriculum, 2) college operations, and 3) community outreach. The framework supplied by sustainability thinking—with its emphasis on interconnectedness, the dynamic nature of complex systems, and the importance of taking the long view—has much in common with the strategic approach adopted by the college’s institutional plan. Indeed, the move towards sustainability has emerged organically out of the priorities established by the institutional plan.

Sustainability thinking and entrepreneurship, then, have become inextricably linked at Ithaca College. The institution’s long history of innovation and pragmatism has furnished a fertile seedbed for the growth of the sustainability initiative, which in turn has helped to facilitate the integration of a liberal education and professional studies, with a strong emphasis on civic engagement. As a result, Ithaca is helping to forge a unique approach to undergraduate learning, an approach that represents the cutting edge of U.S. higher education in the twenty-first century.

Note: This is an abridged version of an essay that first appeared as “Sustainability Thinking and Entrepreneurship: A Case Study,” Peer Review, Vol. 7, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 18-20.