One Tuesday last month, Zach Mermel and Krystal Rogers stayed up until the wee hours crafting a sales pitch. For three years, they and other students at Humboldt State University had fought for the hiring of a sustainability coordinator, but the president had not approved the plan. Mr. Mermel and Ms. Rogers hoped to seal the deal in a meeting the next morning.
The two convened again at 8 a.m. in the library to re-examine their proposal. They inspected a draft of the job description and reviewed a plan to finance it with university funds they had solicited from various departments. Ms. Rogers’s travel mug of herbal tea got cold as they ran through their strategy one last time.
In the president’s office, the students made their case. They outlined the accomplishments of peer institutions’ sustainability coordinators and presented possible projects for one at Humboldt. Their persistence impressed the president, Rollin C. Richmond, who approved the position that morning.
On many campuses, students have become watchdogs for sustainability. Armed with Internet research, they are investigating institutional operations like energy use, food purchasing, investments, transportation, and waste disposal. They are pushing administrators to approve new projects and set higher goals for sustainability. National networks are helping students share strategies with one another and organize sophisticated, often successful proposals for campus innovations and reforms.
Students at Bowdoin and Evergreen State Colleges recently won campaigns to have their institutions purchase 100 percent of their energy from renewable sources — or pay local solar or wind producers to offset their use of nonrenewable energy. At Evergreen, Central Oregon Community College, and the University of Kentucky, students have voted by wide margins to pay additional fees to cover their institutions’ clean-energy purchases. At Dickinson College, students run an organic garden where they grow some of the produce for their dining hall. And at Northwestern University, engineering students have submitted a proposal for a wind turbine on the campus.
“We’re a generation that grew up with global warming in our textbooks,” says Maura Cowley, a recent graduate of Pennsylvania State University’s main campus who now works for the Sierra Student Coalition, traveling around the Northeast to help college students organize campaigns for sustainability.
“On their own, campuses will do something — maybe exchange light bulbs or buy a little bit of wind,” she says. “But that’s not enough. If the steps aren’t being taken, we’re going to have to push for them.”
Taking Action
Student activists run on the renewable energy of big ideas and adrenaline. Where sustainable practices are already in place, they find new programs their colleges could be starting. Where environmentalism is not ingrained, they are making some of the first moves.
Celeste Howe returned from a semester in New Zealand, where she studied resource management and environmental policy, to discover that Point Loma Nazarene University did not recycle.
“I got back to Point Loma,” she says, “and I was like, What the heck? We aren’t doing anything.”
Ms. Howe persuaded the Christian university’s custodial manager to let her organize a recycling program. Before it caught on, she says, some students used the little blue bins to wash their cars.
“It took me going out there, spreading the word, talking to people, getting in the newspaper, making crazy posters,” she says. Within a year, Point Loma, in San Diego, had diverted 50 percent of its waste to recycling.
Ms. Howe also lobbied the president, Bob Brower, to adopt more sustainable practices at the university. Mr. Brower appointed a resource-stewardship committee, which last year supervised the retrofitting of campus buildings with updated lighting and ventilation systems. The changes reduced Point Loma’s electric-energy consumption by nearly a quarter. More broadly, the group promotes “creation care,” a concept that combines Christian principles with environmentalism and social awareness.
“Some key students early on became advocates for it and helped to engage us,” says Mr. Brower. “There is a growing conviction that we do need to take responsibility in these areas.”
A few weeks ago, during Creation Care Week at Point Loma, students, as well as faculty and staff members, recycled electronics, sampled organic food and fair-trade coffee, and toured a wastewater-treatment facility. Creation care is gaining popularity at other Christian colleges, about 30 of which have started campus chapters of Restoring Eden, an evangelical environmental group.
Peter Illyn, founder of the group, says that Christian colleges may not be on the front lines of the sustainability movement, but they are taking up the cause.
“There are growing vocal minorities on campus,” he says, “and they’re enough to begin shifting the debate and making the administration really sit up and take notice.”
Support Networks
When students mobilize on campuses, they often plug into regional or national networks of activists. Representatives from more than 330 colleges across the country have joined the Campus Climate Challenge, a project of the youth coalition Energy Action, and pledged to pursue clean-energy policies at their institutions. The project publicizes “campus energy victories” and runs a lively blog, It’s Getting Hot in Here.
Billy Parish, who in 2004 began coordinating the coalition instead of finishing his bachelor’s degree at Yale University, sees the sustainability movement as the heir to student efforts to end apartheid and close sweatshops. The current campaign may be even more impressive, he thinks.
“In terms of concrete victories and colleges actually making commitments,” he says, “I don’t think anything like this has ever happened before.”
For students who need extra incentives, MTV is sponsoring a Break the Addiction Challenge — the addiction being to oil — and offering grants, parties, and other prizes for the “hottest victories” for campus sustainability.
The Internet has also changed the face of student movements, says Mark E. Boren, an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and author of Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject (Routledge, 2001).
“Historically, students always had to reinvent the wheel, and now they don’t have to,” he says.
Instead they can download activist manuals online and check in with their counterparts on other campuses via instant messages. That leaves more time to develop strategies, Mr. Boren says. “Students are getting much better at presenting their ideas to the university.”
Some student activists have prepared PowerPoint presentations and cost-benefit analyses for administrators and trustees. Their lobbying groups often include a freshman, so that officials will be less inclined to simply wait for the agitators to graduate. When a proposal hangs in the balance, students point out that its adoption will make the college look good and help with student recruitment.
Despite such efforts, administrators often push back. When they do, sustainability activists can turn to networks like Energy Action for support. This past spring Middle Tennessee State and Tennessee Technological Universities passed student-fee increases for clean-energy purchases. Their state system, however, blocked them, citing the chancellor’s reluctance to raise student fees.
In response, Liz Veazey, a founding member of Energy Action who coordinates campus chapters in the Southeast, organized a call-in day in June.
“We put enough pressure on the chancellor of the system that he decided to change his mind,” she says. “It was basically within four or five hours that he said OK.” According to a spokeswoman from the chancellor’s office, the students’ calls “probably did make some difference.”
When colleges do adopt more-sustainable practices, they often turn them into selling points. Several admissions directors report that prospective students often ask about campus sustainability and are impressed to hear a tour guide mention, for instance, that the college’s bus fleet runs on cooking oil recycled from its dining halls.
Many colleges have set up sleek Web sites to promote their green practices and have incorporated sustainability into their marketing pitches to applicants. “They’ve identified this as an important attribute in their college search,” says Seth Allen, dean of admissions at Dickinson. “There are some really dynamite students out there ... who are going to push on these issues to see where institutions stand.”
More Investment Openness
Colleges may be eager to embrace a green image, but they are not always ready to change their ways. When sustainability campaigns turn to endowment investments, administrators are more reluctant to talk to students.
Many institutions “just don’t want to have the discussion relating to the endowment,” says Mark Orlowski, who graduated from Williams College in 2004 and started the Sustainable Endowments Institute to lobby for openness and socially responsible investing. Mr. Orlowski suspects he knows why officials clam up.
“Schools are doing much better on campus sustainability than endowment sustainability,” he says. His group plans to release a “report card” in November with grades in both categories for the colleges with the 100 largest endowments.
Meanwhile, Mr. Orlowski has helped students on various campuses set up advisory committees to study endowment holdings and vote on — or introduce — shareholder resolutions for companies to adopt clean-energy policies, for example. Only 5 percent of more than 200 colleges the group surveyed in the spring involve students in that process. Most institutions, he says, leave the voting to external money managers, who typically side with corporations on resolutions.
In terms of sustainability efforts, “schools are doing things on campus that they’re voting against as shareholders,” Mr. Orlowski says. “We’re really hoping to highlight that disconnect, that dissonance, and eliminate it.”
At Middlebury College, students say their interest in endowment investments was initially rebuffed by administrators.
“They were like, ‘It’s complicated — don’t worry about it. You might as well just go protest at a company’s door,’” says Phil Aroneanu, a senior environmental-studies and anthropology major. “They didn’t want to open themselves up to that kind of criticism.”
But a small band of students kept pushing, and this past spring Middlebury approved the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investment. Last month the five-member committee reviewed a partial list of the college’s holdings and met with Middlebury’s investment manager to discuss their concerns. At this point, those concerns lie primarily in companies’ energy efficiency and environmental reporting, says Mr. Aroneanu.
Like many campus activists, the Middlebury students will try to be patient and strategic. Eventually, they will push for a full list of holdings and the chance to exert pressure on big corporations, says Mr. Aroneanu. This year the students will focus on building a sustainable relationship with trustees to prepare for future requests.
“Next year,” he says, “I think we can be a lot more bold with our moves.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Special Report Volume 53, Issue 9, Page A18
