Richard J. Cook showed up early one morning at Elizabethtown College here to deliver a pitch to a roomful of administrators: Consider doing your part to tackle a major threat to the future of civilization—and maybe save some money, too—by signing the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment.
Mr. Cook, a former president of Allegheny College, now spends part of his time as an evangelist and educator for the climate commitment, and he has given this pitch to more than 200 college leaders over the past couple of years. He was visiting Elizabethtown at the invitation of his longtime friend Theodore E. Long, the college’s president, who is considering signing the document.
“I won’t be shy about it—I hope you become a signatory,” Mr. Cook said straightaway to the administrators. “At the same time, I hope to answer your questions. ... What I want to do is get you engaged in a discussion rather than me lecture to you.”
And the questions came: Why have some prominent colleges, including many in the Ivy League and the Big Ten, refused to join? What are the costs of signing up? Is the commitment politically dangerous—would it associate the college with the political left and alienate people on the right? Why have some colleges seemingly signed up lightly, or with little conviction?
To the question of why some prominent colleges have not joined, Mr. Cook described working on officials at some of those colleges, including his alma maters, Princeton University and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He said they might feel uneasy about lending the colleges’ names to a cause, doubt the feasibility of the ultimate goal of the commitment, or be reluctant to look as if they were simply following the pack. Some worry about saddling a successor with the commitment—but, Mr. Cook pointed out, presidents and other administrators think nothing of passing down all sorts of costs and responsibilities every time they break ground on a new building or approve the tenure of a faculty member.
All were relevant questions at Elizabethtown, especially that one. “Personally, I think that the institution would be well served by joining the climate commitment,” says Mr. Long. But he is planning to retire next year, and he wants to make sure the rest of the college community is on board. “If it’s just Ted’s commitment, it won’t mean anything. It should be the institution’s commitment.”
Of course, serious consideration seems entirely appropriate, because the commitment pledges colleges to a task that is potentially expensive and most certainly difficult—in the view of some, essentially impossible: to reduce the campus’s greenhouse-gas emissions to zero at some point in the foreseeable future.
Impossible or not, some 685 institutions have already made that pledge. Many approached the commitment with great seriousness; others, it seemed, were merely chasing their peers and good publicity, as every signatory was hailed with a barrage of press releases. These days people hardly notice when a college signs up.
And that’s what makes the case of Elizabethtown College intriguing. Distanced from the PR frenzy of the early years, the deliberation of officials today comes down to an assessment of costs, benefits, and the college’s values. At this modestly endowed institution, and perhaps at others like it, the debate may represent a test for the value of the climate commitment—as a project to spur long-term strategic planning, energy efficiency, and environmental values, amid a community of other colleges striving for the same goals.
But as the administrators peppered Mr. Cook with questions, it was clear that they worried about not having the resources lined up to meet the commitment’s goals.
Mr. Cook tried to ease their worries about costs. What are they? Initially, nothing, Mr. Cook said. The college would be able to find “low-hanging fruit” to start to save energy. But the costs might go up, or the investments take longer to recoup, as time goes on.
The potential savings, though, can diffuse the politics of the commitment and help presidents with the “delicate dance” they must do to sell it to conservative trustees, Mr. Cook said. One trustee at Allegheny came from the oil-and-gas industry. Mr. Cook appealed to him from the standpoint of energy efficiency, and he has since become a big advocate of Allegheny’s environmental efforts.
“I try to remove the politics from it because people right, left, or in between care about the future, they care about children and grandchildren, they care about the stewardship of colleges, and they care about spending money well,” Mr. Cook said. “Those are the things that we should concentrate on.”
Regarding why some colleges sign up but then take the commitment lightly, and why Elizabethtown shouldn’t: “I know nothing that will kill this more with a board of trustees than a lukewarm president or a lukewarm chief financial officer,” Mr. Cook said. To be successful, the institution would need a critical mass of people—and even an energized “spark plug” among faculty or staff members, as Mr. Cook put it—to get the actions of the commitment off the ground.
The challenge at Elizabethtown College would be not only finding that advocate, but also getting broad support from people on campus.
Roadblocks and Worries
The conversation about the climate commitment—and the ambivalence about signing it—continue weeks after Mr. Cook’s visit. Concerns about the commitment seem to come down to questions about how it might stretch the college’s resources. Elizabethtown, with about a $50-million endowment, is highly tuition dependent and has no shortage of projects it could spend money or human energy on.
Susan Traverso, provost, is in favor of signing the commitment—but maybe not right now. “The college could be stronger in many ways by putting forward environmentalism and sustainability as an initiative,” she says. But “I think your institution should sign it when it’s ready to sign it and when you have a president who is going to be here for five years to make it happen.”
Joe Metro, facilities director, may be among the most reluctant administrators on campus—possibly because he is already responsible for meeting campus demands on a very limited budget. His analysis shows that Elizabethtown has one of the smallest maintenance budgets on a per-square-foot basis among its peers.
He also insists that the college has already taken steps to become more environmentally conscious, having set up a handful of energy-performance contracts, installed an energy-management system, and even put in a geothermal system 15 years ago, more than a decade ahead of most other institutions. Mr. Metro points out that the college is associated with the Church of the Brethren, a religious order that advocates simplicity as a central tenet, so approaching growth and energy use conservatively might come naturally to the college.
Since the college has already made environmental progress without signing, he says, why rush to sign now? “I have buildings that have antiquated fire-alarm systems and antiquated sprinkler systems,” Mr. Metro points out. If it signed the commitment, he wonders whether the college would be pressed to purchase offsets—ways to compensate for its carbon emissions—rather than spend money on more-necessary things.
Those in Favor
In reality, the college could sign the commitment and never buy a single offset—in fact, it could sign the commitment and never actually reach climate neutrality. The presidents’ climate commitment has few formal deadlines—colleges set their own goals for climate neutrality—and there is no penalty if any deadlines are missed.
Advocates for the climate commitment have said that the journey is the reward. “This is an uncertain and certainly bold initiative, but without committing to it, there is no incentive to get on the path to start that journey,” says Toni Nelson, who manages the climate commitment for Second Nature, a nonprofit group that pushes higher-education leaders to make their campuses eco-friendly (and at which Mr. Cook is a part-time fellow).
Ms. Nelson also stresses that the coming decades might bring not only higher energy prices but also regulations on carbon emissions, which would put the signatories ahead. “Colleges are one of the few institutions that can plan on a 20-year-plus time frame and payback period,” she says. “A lot of schools, once they start on this bold journey, find that they save money.” One small example: After signing the commitment, Allegheny found an alumni couple who gave the college $250,000 to install energy meters in the dormitories—not your typical gift. Allegheny used the meters to start an energy-savings contest among students; the winning dorm cut its consumption by 27 percent, Mr. Cook says.
Certainly colleges as needy as or needier than Elizabethtown have signed up: Adrian College, in Michigan, with a $37-million endowment, joined this year after its president, Jeffrey R. Docking, consulted with Mr. Cook and determined that the climate commitment would not be a drain on the college’s finances. (The college has also had booming enrollment in recent years, which takes pressure off the bottom line.)
“I didn’t want to sign on to an agreement for political reasons or marketing reasons without knowing whether we would be able to reach it,” says Mr. Docking. “The thing that I liked about this initiative is that it provides a goal. It requires a whole campus initiative to be successful.” He did not consult with faculty members and students before signing but rather with a circle of top administrators.
Political Challenges
The climate commitment pushes a campus to talk about consumption, the college’s ideals, and how those ideals square with student expectations. The topic of those expectations came up at lunch on the day Mr. Cook visited, when he sat down with students, faculty members, and administrators. A short debate broke out between Mr. Metro and Suzanne E. Webster, a young professor of English who has organized an environmental group on campus and has a personal interest in superefficient natural building methods.
Ms. Webster suggested that, to save energy under the commitment, maybe the college could get back to traditional building techniques, using natural airflow to cool buildings, eliminating the need for air conditioning. Maybe students and faculty members could live with being a few degrees too hot or too cold now and then.
Mr. Metro dismissed her suggestion, saying that “society as a whole” had come to expect comforts. “Politically, how are we going to attract students to a building that doesn’t have air conditioning?” he asked. In fact, just that morning he had received a call from people in one building who wanted the heat turned on, even though the temperature there was a reasonable 72 degrees. He was obliged to turn on the boilers and deliver their heat.
Does the climate commitment provide cover for colleges that want to press for behavioral changes among students, faculty members, or even administrators? Kurt M. DeGoede, an associate professor who chairs the physics and engineering department and who strongly favors signing the commitment, thinks it might. (He says he never had air conditioning in the dorms in college, and he graduated in the early 1990s.)
He thinks the college should sign up for ethical reasons and because the goals would jibe with the work of his department, where students are interested in renewable-energy technology. He likens the commitment to joining a group training for a marathon. “Having a target that might be beyond our reach, but still something to strive for—even if we have something of an indication that we’ll never quite get there—is not necessarily a negative thing.”
Mr. Long, Elizabethtown’s president, also sees a number of benefits to signing, but he wants to see where the campus takes the conversation. He does think students and others on campus could rally around the commitment to save energy. “We modify behavior all the time,” he says of the college’s work with students.
That behavior modification might start in his office: It was a sunny day when he spoke those words in his little corner of the campus, but the shades were drawn. The room was lit by four decorative lamps and two hot rows of spotlights.
