How Colleges Can Revive Climate Goals
“Sustainability” may not have the buzz of 2008, but it’s re-emerging in institutional risk management, and higher ed has a responsibility to experiment — and team up with local communities.

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Produced by Carmen Mendoza
Following is a transcript of the conversation.
“Whenever you can provide an academic outcome that comes from a sustainability-related capital expense, you’re really getting more bang for your buck and showing the students that sustainability is possible in an era where, frankly, many of the students who come to us have real doubts about whether or not climate change or sustainability issues will ever seriously be addressed by the people in power.” —Jay Antle
Scott Carlson: Hello, I’m Scott Carlson, and welcome to The Evolving Campus.
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Produced by Carmen Mendoza
Following is a transcript of the conversation.
“Whenever you can provide an academic outcome that comes from a sustainability-related capital expense, you’re really getting more bang for your buck and showing the students that sustainability is possible in an era where, frankly, many of the students who come to us have real doubts about whether or not climate change or sustainability issues will ever seriously be addressed by the people in power.” —Jay Antle
Scott Carlson: Hello, I’m Scott Carlson, and welcome to The Evolving Campus. The voice you just heard belongs to Jay Antle, executive director of the Center for Sustainability and a professor of history at Johnson County Community College [in Kansas]. Jay, who is also chair of the Board of Directors of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, will be joining me to talk about how sustainability has evolved in recent years and where students can get hands-on experience in sustainability projects on campus.
Also joining me later in the podcast is Nilda Mesa, a scholar with the Earth Institute at Columbia University, who will discuss the collaborations and partnerships that colleges can pursue in sustainability projects and efforts.
This podcast is sponsored by Perkins Eastman. Halfway through the episode, you’ll hear a bit about sustainability from Dan Arons, principal at Perkins Eastman, along with Brock Read, editor of The Chronicle. Now back to Scott.
Carlson: OK, we’re back, and we’re joined by Jay Antle of Johnson County Community College. Jay, welcome to The Evolving Campus.
Jay Antle: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.
Carlson: Jay, where do you think the campus-sustainability movement is today, given that sustainability hasn’t had the focus that it had, say, in 2008 or ’10? Where does it stand now? It’s out of the headlines and doesn’t get the kind of attention that it used to.
Antle: Well, I guess I would push back a little bit on that overall frame in your question. Sustainability continues to be an important thing at many institutions across the country. We certainly still have 800 colleges and universities that are members of AASHE. We still have a number of institutions that are part of Second Nature’s various climate commitments and are currently reporting. But certainly I think you’re right in terms of the overall mind-share of college presidents, that it doesn’t seem to have the same level of attention that it did back in 2008, 2009, 2010.
I wonder if that will change if we have lots of climate-change-related funding in either the infrastructure or the reconciliation bills that are currently coming out of Congress. I’ll also say that back in that 2008-10 period, there were some expectations that were ultimately unfulfilled by Congress. There were some expectations that you would have meaningful climate-change legislation that would create long-lasting incentives to create, for example, jobs that community colleges created green-jobs training programs for. In some places that happened; in other places it didn’t.
What’s happened since then is that, at least in terms of the green-jobs front — and I’m talking here primarily about energy efficiency and renewable energy — is that the costs, particularly of renewable energy, have gone down, like solar panels, for example. And so in some parts of the country, you’ve had those programs really begin to grow in the last five years or so, mostly for economic reasons, as well as folks wanting to do the right thing. But I think one of the reasons why sustainability has lost a little bit of the attention of senior leaders is what senior leaders did back in the ’08, ’09, ’10 period, which was put sustainability largely under facilities at many institutions.
And so many facilities managers suddenly had people who worked for them who spent half their time working with students and working with faculty and doing things that weren’t just facilities-related. And so when it came time to cut budgets over the last decade, many times sustainability officers in facility departments were some of the things that got cut. I think you’re going to see that reversing going forward as climate change becomes more of a thing that can’t be ignored.
And you’re even seeing that showing up on the way that colleges’ debt ratings are currently being assessed by companies like Moody’s. Moody’s hired a climate-data agency to help them determine what sort of debt ratings they should give to colleges and universities. Insurance rates for institutions are going up around the country too.
So I think some of what we used to call “sustainability” is now going to show up in what we’re calling “resilience planning” for colleges and universities, and may be driven by the risk-management side of the house. And to say nothing of the divestment movement on the part of students. Certainly if you look at the headlines in The Chronicle and other places, there’s lots of attention being paid to divestment from fossil fuels, and that’s also part of this larger movement. So while I accept part of the framing of the question, I think there’s a lot going on as well, but not necessarily in the same exact ways.
Carlson: Back in that time, climate neutrality and the president’s climate commitment were sort of a big thing. What seems to be the focus now?
Antle: Well, it depends, I think, very much on the institution, and that’s kind of a non-answer. But I think institutions that were relatively well resourced over the last decade have done a lot of the really easy stuff in terms of energy efficiency, the conversions to LED lighting, retro-commissioning, that kind of work. And in many cases, even doing some entry into either installing renewable energy on campuses or pursuing some kind of a power-purchase agreement, depending on the state you’re in and the way utilities are regulated.
And so there are some institutions, though, that are less resourced for those things, like the basic stuff like LED retrofits or better insulation — the energy-efficiency stuff that still needs to be done. I’m hoping there’ll be some money ultimately coming out of Congress in the next year or so to help underresourced institutions do that.
But carbon neutrality is still a thing, and I think now the challenge is setting deadlines that are realistic and with interim targets that can now be achieved as you’ve had improvements in technology. Electrification is going to be a thing for some campuses, I think, as they decide how they’re going to be able to make their climate-neutrality goals if they’re tied at the hip to natural gas or fossil fuels in one form or another.
I also think electrification in terms of campus fleets is going to be a thing. Certainly we’ve had pledges from automakers like GM that they’re going to be phasing out internal-combustion engines by 2035. We’ll see if that actually happens. But certainly there will be a real drive for campuses to be electrifying their fleets and providing EVs for people who come to their campuses. So I think electrification is very much going to be a thing.
And solar, depending where you are in the country, the cost of that’s come down pretty dramatically. For us here at Johnson County Community College, our cost per watt for solar installs has gone down by roughly half over the course of the last six years, and we’re getting paybacks now on our commercial-size installs on our rooftops of about 10 to 11 years for a system that’s going to last 20 to 30 years. So a lot of things like that are possible for the institutions that have the commitment and the resources to do that kind of work.
But again, at lots of other institutions who are underresourced — I’m thinking particularly about minority-serving institutions, I’m thinking about many community colleges — some of that basic work still needs to be done.
Carlson: How are colleges combining the work that needs to be done in sustainability with student education and engagement in this area?
Antle: Again, it depends largely on how institutions are organizing their sustainability efforts, but there are a lot of places that are now taking up the idea of turning their campuses, their physical campuses, into learning labs for sustainability and leveraging capital improvements thus for academic purposes directly. And that can be, for example, for solar panels. Not only could you conceivably have students be part of that process — perhaps you have students come in and learn how to maintain those installations on your campuses, depending, of course, on how your risk-management policies go and what your state health-occupational safety codes are, too.
This is important stuff, to make sure your students are safe when they’re doing this kind of work. But then just the data front — the data from those kinds of installations can be used by statistics courses or math courses, college algebra courses. That’s what we do here at Johnson County Community College.
So there are other institutions that are doing things with their green stormwater installation — their bioswales, their native plant installations — and teaching their students how to maintain those kinds of landscapes. There’s now a demand in various parts of the country for native landscaping. Whenever you can provide an academic outcome that comes from a sustainability-related capital expense, you’re really getting more bang for your buck and showing the students that sustainability is possible in an era where, frankly, many of the students who come to us have real doubts about whether or not climate change or sustainability issues will ever seriously be addressed by the people in power.
Carlson: You know, one of the big challenges in addressing infrastructure and green power in this country has been just the decline of the trades over all, and certainly that’s also a place where community colleges have been important. How does a community college start to talk about the importance of these jobs and maybe help students identify with careers in them?
Antle: This is a really fascinating question, and it may return a little bit to your original framing question about where we’ve come since 2008, 2009, 2010, and this is going to be very much different from region to region. I think in some places like the coasts, New York and California, these programs were seen as being cool and marketable from the beginning, with only a couple of valleys in terms of student enrollment.
But in other parts of the country, I think when standalone programs were created, like a standalone solar program or a standalone energy-efficiency program, those seemed kind of new and unusual, and students weren’t necessarily attracted to them. What I think has been more successful in more places is the integration of those kinds of classes and that kind of expertise into existing career programs, like electrical tech, so that students can then take a track and get their solar-installer certification but while still getting a certificate that sounds very familiar and one in which there’s no doubt they’ll be able to get a job.
So I think part of what’s going on here is understanding that what we kind of called “standalone sustainability” 10 years ago really should be best understood as being integral parts of existing career fields across the board. And so I think when you market things that way, students are much more comfortable, much more enthusiastic, and much more eager.
Carlson: Jay, we opened this conversation talking about how sustainability wasn’t really in the headlines anymore. But of course, climate change is still with us, and all the problems that come with it are still with us. How do students regard these problems for their future, and what do they think is the responsibility of institutions?
Antle: Yeah, I think this is a really important question, and I think that senior leaders at colleges and universities ignore this question at their peril. Students come to us in higher education with various degrees of despair and despondency about the future. There have been some pretty discouraging polls that I’ve seen over the course of the last six months in which young adults all around the world were asked about their perceptions of their future. And in the United States, for example, only 20 percent of young adults surveyed believe that American political institutions were capable of solving issues like climate change.
So we have students coming to us with real doubts about what kind of world they and their children are going to be inhabiting. And I think if we as institutions of higher education don’t rally and show these students that, no, there are in fact things we can do and are doing at our institutions, then we are failing in one of the core missions we have, and that is to inspire hope. There has been data showing that students who have the financial wherewithal to choose their institution of higher education will clearly choose institutions that have made environmental commitments over those who don’t.
There are lots of things that we can do on our campuses that will show students that there’s no reason for despair, no reason for hopelessness. But there are actual practical things they can do, and their careers can be informed and enhanced by being a solution to some of the problems that we’re talking about.
Carlson: Well, Jay, thanks for joining me on The Evolving Campus.
Antle: Thank you for having me.
Carlson: We’re going to take a brief break for a message from our sponsor.
Brock Read: Hi, I’m Brock Read. I’m the editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Really happy to be here today speaking with Dan Arons. Dan is a principal at Perkins Eastman, and we’re going to talk today about campus sustainability. Dan, thank you so much for your time.
Dan Arons: Thanks for having me. It’s an important topic, and I’m glad to be here with you.
Read: So, Dan, we hear a lot, and I think campus leaders hear a lot as well, about LEED certification and net-zero building as important goals for campus building. Those are vitally important things, but what other campus trends are you seeing in sustainable design or sustainable practices that feel promising or exciting to you?
Arons: What I would say is that the trend is moving away from one-dimensional solutions. One-dimensional solutions in sustainability — it’s not enough. We need to think about more than, say, energy. We need to be thinking about wellness and equity and a lot of different topics that are important on campuses that all come together under this umbrella of sustainability.
Read: Dan, if you go back several years, I think there was a lot of talk across campuses — certainly in the pages of The Chronicle — about climate neutrality as a goal. Since then, climate change has only accelerated and advanced, and I wonder how that’s changed the discussion in the campus building-and-planning community.
Arons: I think that it’s sharpened the point. The thing that has changed is time. We have less of it. That was certainly predictable when we started off recognizing that we had to do something. But I think that we’ve been moving a lot slower than we would like to have been moving. The lack of time is sharpening the point on what we need to do.
Where there were a lot of commitments to sustainability, they were over this unimaginable period of time, like 10 and 20 years. Well, we’ve eaten up decades now since we’ve started talking about this. LEED was young in the late ’90s, thinking of 2030 as more than a generation away. Well — guess what? — it’s not more than a generation away now, and we need to really be moving. In fact, some of the things that we’ve all rallied around, some of the strategies, they’re not quite enough. We need to actually be coming up with new strategies beyond that in order to really advance what we’re doing.
Read: I think, broadly speaking, we’re in a time right now where there’s evidence that many people are feeling a sort of fatalism about climate change, in a sense that we haven’t been up to the task, and it’s getting late, as you said. And I wonder what role do universities have in demonstrating and modeling what can still be done effectively?
Arons: Well, my goodness, colleges and universities are all about the future, are they not? We’re educating and training for the next generation. We’ve had this challenge, we know it’s taken longer than we want, but let’s not be fatalistic about it.
We are in some ways suffering the things that we created as a society in the second Industrial Revolution. Now we’re at the fourth Industrial Revolution, and these students that are rising now have to address all of those issues, and they need unbridled optimism. There’s just no question about it. Without confidence that they can do it, they won’t be able to do it. So we need to be positive about it, and we need changes that are both technological and cultural. Both of those things are coming.
The technological changes are there. We’ve advanced in terms of efficient systems, in terms of understanding, again, perhaps, how to design solar-passive-designed buildings, well-insulated buildings. We’ve got great technologies coming on the building side. We need to do more of that, and we need to advance into battery storage and other types of energy control on a systems basis.
And then we need to keep advancing culturally so that this cohort of students is thinking, again, about urban together with equity together with some of the social issues that need to be addressed and find ways of co-optimizing those. I mean, when we design for engineering schools, we know that the population there is just a fragment of our population being represented. So we need more ideas from more people, more perspectives, and that needs to be folded into a humble approach to, not a fatalistic approach, but a humble approach to: We’ve got big tasks ahead of us, and we need to find new solutions.
We don’t have them all, and it’s not enough to say, Hey, this is easy. It’s not. We can do net-zero buildings. We can, but it’s not enough. We need to do more.
And you asked, What’s the role of colleges and universities? Well, they need to do better than we need to do as a society, on average, because they have the technology, they have the information, they have the wealth, really, even if they will always remind us that they don’t have the budget. But they need to be setting the example and pushing it forward. So the bar has to be a little bit higher, even for colleges and universities.
Read: Dan, there’s so much to chew on here. Thank you so much for the time and the insight. It’s been great talking to you.
Arons: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much for making the space to have the conversation.
Carlson: We’re back, and we’re joined by Nilda Mesa of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Nilda, welcome to The Evolving Campus.
Nilda Mesa: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Carlson: So you and I met, it must have been about 12 years ago, when you were working in sustainability on campuses at colleges and universities. You were working for Columbia at the time. Where do you think the campus-sustainability movement is today? Has it achieved what you thought or what people thought it would back then?
Mesa: I mean, in some ways, yes. In other ways, I think that there’s still quite a bit more to be done. Back in those days, we were still more or less defining the field and defining the scope. I remember early on — and you probably recall this — that there was a big discussion that went on for a number of years about what exactly does it mean to be a sustainable campus. And at that time, the sustainability definition didn’t really include much about urban campuses, and that also meant that it didn’t necessarily include much about environmental justice and the equity issues that have now really come much more to the forefront.
So I would say that the field, in general, has evolved. The technology has evolved. Certainly the collection of data has evolved, the participation of colleges, I mean certainly in the United States and North America, but even more outside of the U.S. and North America, has increased dramatically in the last few years.
I mean, the first few meetings that I went to was a really very small group of colleges and universities that were looking at these issues. And now, as I look at the AASHE listing of all the colleges and universities that are participating, it’s just exploded. So that all [augurs] well, I think, for the future, but there’s a whole lot of work still left to be done.
Carlson: So as colleges continue to act in this area, where do you think the big opportunities are for them to make forward progress on campus sustainability or community sustainability?
Mesa: One of the big areas of opportunity is how colleges and universities are able to push the envelope. They can push the envelope on the buildings and operations and maintenance side of things by incorporating new technology, new practices, even perhaps sometimes new financing models, and they can serve as a proving ground for others to try some new things out.
I think in the future one of the areas that colleges and universities need to look at is risk, and to the extent that weather patterns are changing, and the climate is certainly changing, I do think that they need to re-evaluate how much risk they may be under for their own campuses as a result. And I don’t think that conversation has happened all that much, unless you’re at a college or university that’s been directly impacted by things like fires and extreme-heat events and floods and so forth. But I do think that that’s an area that colleges and universities need to pay more attention to in the future.
Carlson: Certainly college towns are these kinds of places where the college is really an economic and cultural anchor in a community. How does sustainability evolve in that kind of environment?
Mesa: What I have seen, both from the city side as well as from the college and university side, is that it’s more common now than it used to be to have a partnership between cities and city governments and colleges and universities. So as cities and city governments are focused more and more on the potential impacts of climate change on their own cities, they don’t necessarily have the staffing or the expertise that can conduct the research that’s needed.
And so they will regularly turn to the local college or university that does have that expertise, and they will often be the ones who will be providing a lot of the content and a lot of the research that cities need in order to take care of their own residents for the future. So I see that as only increasing, and that benefits everybody. I mean, it certainly benefits the researchers at a university and the students who are involved, whether they’re undergraduate or graduate students, and is a real contribution for the city or town that the college or university is in.
And in addition, it could spread beyond just that city and town, because cities and towns talk to each other, and there are all kinds of networks of cities and towns, and they will exchange best practices and ideas and who’s discovered what new thing that can actually solve some big problem. And other cities will look at that because everyone’s looking for solutions to this. And we’re in this tremendous time of transition where everyone’s trying to figure out: What do we do next?
Carlson: Certainly there’s a need for students to get real-world opportunities in various fields. And if the colleges are partnering with the local communities, I mean, I guess that can be a good source of experience for these students and also just give them a perspective on what it’s like to work with local governments on some of these issues.
Mesa: It’s more than that. It’s not just that they’re getting job experience; it’s that the faculty and researchers at colleges and universities are being called upon to frame the issues for a city, for a mayor’s office. And it could be that that city doesn’t have the research ability or the data-collection ability, and so then it becomes more of an academic partnership. And so students may get the experience, but it’s also the faculty and the researchers then who get to have some kind of influence on what cities and towns are trying to solve for.
Carlson: Is it mainly the academic and intellectual resources that cities can take advantage of from these colleges, or do you also see a lot of partnerships around things like energy generation or landscape, stormwater, some more of these facilities-oriented kinds of problems?
Mesa: Yeah, there’s that, too. I mean, I think in large part it depends on the geography and the conditions in a particular area and how the relations are between a city and a particular college or university. But I think that colleges and universities can innovate and try out — I mean, it’s part of their charge to innovate and to look for solutions and to research things. And they can design or try out different designs that then make it less risky for a city or town to try out.
Carlson: We started out this conversation talking about how you and I met 12 years ago, when we were both working on sustainability issues in higher education — me from a journalist side, you within the industry or the sector. I just wondered now, here we are, we’ve seen incredible wildfires, lots of flooding, and just unsettling issues around class and race. It seems like things are sort of a lot farther along and much worse than we thought it might be back then. How do you feel about the relationship between colleges and communities? What’s the future of the college town in a climate-challenged world?
Mesa: I think that it’s just going to be more and more important for cities and colleges and universities to work together. They bring different strengths to the table. But you’ve got to have a college or university open to that, and also be able to get funding for that, and you’ve got to have leadership at the city to be able to look for those kinds of opportunities. And city governments often don’t really understand what colleges and universities do, much the same way that people who may be working on climate issues on the science side or wherever don’t necessarily understand how governments function.
So to the extent that they can get to know each other better and try to figure out where they can plug in, I think that makes the future all the better. I’ve seen examples where an academic team will come up with what they think is the perfect solution, maybe on the engineering side, and then when they go try it out in a community, well, the community’s response will be things like You’re taking away our parking spaces or What you’re setting up is going to attract rats and vermin. And that’s the kind of information that innovators need to have, also because that’s real-world stuff. And where things fall apart is when those kinds of concerns don’t have a place to go, because then you won’t get a really good result. You’ll get something that maybe looks good on paper but that a community will oppose.
It sounds very trite, but it’s important for there to be an understanding between a college, university, and the neighboring community, and sometimes that’s just missing. Sometimes on the academic side people are just really thinking about their own research and what’s going to get me tenure, and/or we just need to keep the place running, we need to recruit more students, we need to recruit the kind of students we want to recruit — you know, that kind of thing. And they think they’re in a bubble or their own little world, and they don’t necessarily realize the impact that they can have on the surrounding community.
So I think it’s something that’s just ever-evolving, and sometimes universities have a tendency to shut down in a way. But the less that they do that and the more that they open up to the residents and organizations around them, I think the richer an experience can be and the richer opportunities that will develop for the future for both.
And as more cities and more states are developing technology and rules and regulations and laws on cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, colleges and universities need to be aware of those rapid developments. Is hydrogen a viable fuel for certain colleges and universities? It might well be. What are they doing with solar? What’s going on with the local utility? These are all questions that colleges and universities at the administrative level should be asking, and I’m not so sure that they all are.
So it’s a tricky time for colleges and universities, but they need to be paying attention.
Carlson: Nilda Mesa, thanks so much for joining us on The Evolving Campus.
Mesa: Thank you, Scott. It’s always a pleasure talking with you, and I look forward to following your podcast.
Carlson: This has been The Evolving Campus, a Chronicle of Higher Education podcast sponsored by Perkins Eastman. For additional episodes, look for us on the Chronicle website or on your favorite podcast app. I’m Scott Carlson.