The American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment has released its 2008 annual report, and while the organization said that the number of participating colleges grew during the year from 467 to 605, it also acknowledged that nearly a quarter of member institutions had already fallen behind in meeting their obligations under the two-year-old commitment. (In the list of member institutions at the end of the report, you can see where your institution stands — or at least where it stood at the end of last year — if it has signed the commitment.)

An institution shown as in good standing had either “submitted all reports due by December 31, 2008, or received approval for an extension,” the report says. Among the prominent institutions...

Tight budgets have prodded the University of Tennessee system to consider selling Sequoyah Place, a Georgian-style manse known lately as home to short-tenured presidents and expensive improvements, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported today.

John D. Petersen, departing president of the four-campus system, moves out of the residence next month, after almost five years at the helm. His two immediate predecessors both left the post amid scandals after putting more than $1.3-million in upgrades into the house, which has been home to presidents and chancellors since 1960.

The 11,000-square-foot home played a role in the downfall of John W. Shumaker, whose one-year stint as president ended in 2003, after an uproar over his spending, including $493,000 on the house. Notable expenses...

Looking up at the underside of a 19th-century staircase at the Peabody Institute, in Baltimore. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

Nowdays so many staircases are tucked away in dull cinder-block towers — for fire safety, of course — that when a new building turns out to have an interesting staircase, it’s worth enjoying. You can read about what is almost certainly higher education’s most entertaining new staircase, at the California Institute of Technology’s Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, in the architecture issue of The Chronicle Review. (Don’t forget to check the

The University of Iowa has decided that it makes more sense to build a new performing-arts center away from the Iowa River than to repair its existing Hancher Auditorium, which was badly damaged in last year’s flood. The university has also decided against repairing a nearby art building.

According to the Press-Citizen, university officials say the issue isn’t only that the buildings could flood again, but also that flood insurance is tough to come by. Anyway, they say, they need more space.

They’ll ask the Iowa Board of Regents for permission to go ahead with site selection and planning for the new buildings. Replacing the performing-arts complex is expected to cost $246-million, while building a new facility to replace the Art Building East will run to...

Bob Greenstreet at the Milwaukee Art Museum. (Photograph by Ralf-Finn Hestoft)

Bob Greenstreet, dean of the architecture school at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, is the longest-serving dean of any architecture school in the country, starting in 1990. Since 2004, he has also been the leading planner for the city of Milwaukee. He is known for playing several roles in the city: mediator, networker, stalwart champion of good design. You can read Scott Carlson’s profile of Mr. Greenstreet in the Architecture Issue of The Chronicle Review.

Two architecture-school buildings — one completed in 1963 and the other opened last year — are in some ways surprisingly similar. The older of the two is Paul Rudolph’s famous Brutalist masterpiece at Yale University; the younger is Antoine Predock’s building at the University of New Mexico. You can read about them in an article in this week’s Chronicle Review.

The Yale building, originally called the Art & Architecture Building, has been renovated, expanded, and renamed — it’s now the Rudolph Building. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

While I am not an architect, I am a psychologist. Space is a psychologically complex matter. On college and university campuses, this is evidenced by the importance many faculty members place on the size and location of their offices and their research space. Space hoarding is common and is often exacerbated by space policies that do not assure allocation of space in an equitable, transparent, or just manner.

Space utilization has historically been focused primarily on classrooms and teaching labs. This has likely been due to the ease of collecting and analyzing such data. Colleges publish and collect data regarding class schedules for state and federal reporting. However, classrooms and teaching spaces occupy a relatively small percentage of the...

Georgia Tech hopes the Marcus Nanotechnology Building will help make Atlanta the hub of new high-tech industry. (Photos courtesy of Georgia Tech)

Tomorrow the Georgia Institute of Technology will dedicate the Marcus Nanotechnology Building, a project that officials say is one of the most expensive in the institution’s history.

Georgia Tech hopes that theundefined$90-million, 190,000-square-foot complex will attract companies to Atlanta, making the city and Georgia Tech a nanotechnology hub. (News releases about the building compare nanotechnology in Atlanta to technology in Silicon Valley.) The building reportedly has one of the largest clean rooms in the country. See a video of the building

People have stepped forward to volunteer for guest-blogging spots on Buildings & Grounds, but we have room for more. Our past bloggers have written about topics as diverse as campus landscapes, religious architecture, parking, carbon offsets, and ugly vending...

The U. of Utah breaks ground today on an energy-efficient lab. (Lord, Aeck & Sargent images)

The University of Utah is marking Earth Day with a groundbreaking for a 200,000-square-foot, $130-million interdisciplinary research facility that will be built to meet gold-level standards in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.

The James L. Sorenson Molecular Biotechnology Building, designed by Lord, Aeck & Sargent, will use 40 percent less energy than a comparable building designed just to satisfy laboratory code requirements. The new building will feature elements seen in many LEED-certified structures: natural lighting, rainwater harvesting and bioswales, local materials, fly-ash concrete, and low-toxin finishes. The...