Now open for tours: Furman U’s Cliffs Cottage was built with local, sustainable, and energy efficient materials. (Photo by Jeremy Fleming)

The Cliffs Cottage at Furman University, built with the magazine Southern Living, certainly is dreamy. But as a sustainable model home, it will also be a living laboratory for green building — a place where students and professors can learn about the latest materials and techniques in construction. You can read a story about the Cliffs Cottage in the latest edition of The Chronicle, and you can see a slideshow with lots of pictures of the house.

The University of California at Berkeley has made some compromises to clear the way toward building an athletic training center, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

“In documents submitted in Alameda County Superior Court, the university says it will scrap all non-football events at Memorial Stadium and drop plans to attach a concrete support beam to the stadium’s west wall, two roadblocks cited in a judge’s interim ruling in the case last week,” the article says. “UC’s proposed judgment also asks Judge Barbara Miller to immediately lift an injunction that prevents the university from beginning construction on the center in a grove of oak trees next to the stadium, where tree-sitters have been roosting for 18 months in protest of the...

At least a few times a week, I speak with a college administrator disappointed that his institution’s net greenhouse-gas emissions have not decreased over time, despite the number of reduction measures undertaken on the campus. What isn’t immediately evident from looking at the emission data is how many square feet of new campus space the institution has added even as it has been taking steps to shrink its carbon footprint. Efficiency measures, renewable-energy installations, and fuel-switching all reduce a college’s carbon emissions—but most colleges are simultaneously growing. Even the greenest construction project increases a college’s carbon footprint.

One of the greatest challenges in meeting...

The University of Baltimore is holding a contest to design a $107-million law center, reports Edward Gunts, the architecture critic for The Sun.

“University officials are scheduled to announce today that they are working with the Abell Foundation to hold a $150,000 competition to select the architect, landscape architect, and other design consultants for a $107-million law center,” Mr. Gunts writes. “Robert C. Embry Jr., president of the Abell Foundation, has long sought ways to raise the quality of the design of new buildings throughout Baltimore. He said he was receptive to the idea of supporting a design competition for the proposed law center because it will be a prominent building in a key city location.”

Robert L. Bogomolny, the...

The Chronicle recently caught a moment with Donald J. Guckert, associate vice president and director of facilities management at the University of Iowa, as he worked to dry out his campus and get things running again. He had a few thoughts for Chronicle readers about preparing for disasters.

“We tend to think about the campus in terms of buildings, but it is the utility system that has left us with the greatest challenges,” he said. Campus buildings are connected by a network of utility tunnels. During a flood in 1993, those tunnels took on water and contributed to the flooding of buildings. Now they are inundated, as is the university’s power plant.

Only a sixth of the campus flooded this time around. “But everything is connected by a power plant that is on the river,” Mr. Guckert says. “Our biggest challenge...

Shopping locally: Officials in Suffolk County, N.Y., have apparently negotiated an end to a dispute that threatened $58-million in construction projects at Suffolk County Community College, according to Newsday. At the heart of the dispute was a local law requiring county agencies to give preference to local contractors—a law the college was accused of violating when it selected an architect for a new library. The college’s board has agreed to comply with the requirement, the newspaper says.

Cold water: Construction is underway on two new chiller plants at Illinois State University. According to the

The Education Center at the U. of Maine at Farmington will be used to help teach students about sustainability. (Chronicle photograph by Lawrence Biemiller)

Eight colleges have been awarded U.S. Green Building Council grants for programs that teach about sustainable construction: Cornell University received a grant for a program in which students will go out of the classroom to understand the broad scope of green building practice. The Eastern Iowa Community College District received a grant for a green-construction-technologies program it is creating within its Renewable Energy Systems Technician program. Grand Valley State University...

The U. of Phoenix is creating social spaces for its online students. (U. of Phoenix images)

Loneliness may be fine for distance runners, but for distance-education students, it can be a barrier to success, particularly for students confused by their course work or the mechanics of navigating online classes.

That’s why the University of Phoenix has begun to develop new drop-in centers for its distance-education students. The specially-designed centers house tutoring services and double as social spaces. About 200,000 of the university’s 330,000 students take courses online.

The first of the centers,...

Rice University officials are continuing their investigation of an accident Thursday afternoon that killed one construction worker and injured seven others.

According to a university news release, the accident occurred when a severe thunderstorm toppled concrete-block walls on the second floor of a new residential college the university is building. The workers were in the process of securing the construction site when high winds knocked the walls over, the university said.

The man who was killed—Juan Romero, of Missouri City, Tex.—was an employee of a masonry firm hired by the project’s general contractor. Four other workers remained hospitalized Sunday, the university said, but none have injuries believed to be life-threatening.

This week’s floods severed utility connections between the east and west sides of the University of Iowa’s campus, according to a flood update posted by Lola L. Lopes, the university’s interim vice president and provost.

On the west side of the Iowa River, Ms. Lopes reports, utilities are functioning normally, but to protect the systems university officials will need to control the rate at which research projects are ramped back up to regular operating levels. On the east side of the river, however, the university power plant is still off line. So for the time being, she says, the east side of the campus will probably have to get by with only about 40 percent of its normal air-conditioning capacity, even with temporary chillers in place.

University officials...