Just as many colleges ponder what to do about their use of coal, Cornell University has announced that it will stop burning the stuff. The university's combined heat and power plant, which opened today, will allow it to get off of coal power within 18 months.

At a news conference this morning, David Skorton, Cornell's president, stood alongside Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, which is urging colleges to stop burning coal.

The university uses 60,000 to 70,000 tons of coal each year. The new heat and power plant is a major part of its strategy to meet the demands of the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment.

Southwestern University has hammered out an agreement to get all of its electrical power from Texas wind sources, potentially for the next 18 years.

According to news reports about the deal, the university says it is the first in Texas to get all of its electrical power from renewable sources. Southwestern is not a huge institution; the announcement about the deal says that the college consumes as much energy as about 450 homes, which is roughly the capacity of one large wind turbine.

Southwestern's president, Jake B. Schrum, signed the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment a year ago, and the wind-power deal helps the college toward the goal of climate neutrality.

Of course, the power is not coming directly from those turbines. The university is still getting its power from the grid. Richard Anderson, vice president for fiscal affairs at Southwestern, told the...

In the past, we have noted instances where colleges have purchased the grounds and buildings of manufacturing facilities -- a trend that both highlights higher education's status as one of the last major American industries and symbolizes the decline of American manufacturing. So what does this latest purchase say about -- gulp -- the future of American journalism and publishing?

New York University has purchased the Forbes building in Manhattan -- a deal, The Wall Street Journal notes, that comes as "part of the Forbes family's continuing efforts to offset steep advertising declines at its namesake magazine."

The financial terms of the deal were not released, but the magazine will continue to lease space in the building, which is in Greenwich Village.

The first major system to measure colleges' achievements in sustainability will be introduced this month by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. The project is called the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System, better known as Stars.

Environmental publications, college guides, and advocacy groups have put together various sustainability ratings for colleges, but the methodologies are often suspect -- and some critics ask whether the systems promote greenwashing and undesirable competition among colleges. Advocates for Stars have said it should be used to track progress and chart a path to improvements.

The association will hold a Webinar about the new rating system on January 19. To get more information and sign up for the event, go here.

Perhaps it's just the headlines we see, but it seems that Boston colleges in particular have problems with town-gown relationships. Consider the wrangling over the future of development at Boston College or Harvard University.

But this is something else entirely: a trans-Atlantic town-gown feud.

Boston University irked neighbors of its Victorian-era study-abroad home in London when it installed noisy air-conditioning units behind the building. Nearby residents in the South Kensington neighborhood find the units to be an eyesore as well as a racket, and they have complained to city-planning officials.

"BU has deeply upset the neighbors and caused us a lot of time and effort to undo what they’ve done without permission," Holly Smith, a neighbor, told The Boston Globe. "BU is a foreign university. They are guests in this country, and they haven’t behaved in a neighborly way. I am ashamed...

A group of Texas colleges and local economic-development organizations plans to renovate an old tire-manufacturing facility to create a research park in Waco, Tex.

The Central Texas Technology and Research Park, as the project is known, is led by Baylor University, Texas State Technical College, and McLennan Community College, along with McLennan County, the City of Waco, and several regional government and development agencies. The state Legislature and the Baylor Board of Regents have provided $10-million each for the project.

The 300,000-square-foot facility, once owned by General Tire, was built in 1940 and closed in 1986. The architecture firm Perkins and Will studied the site and determined that the building could be occupied within 18 months. First comes removing the old plant equipment, restoring the brickwork, putting on a new roof, replacing the windows, and adding...

Among the all-natural, biodegradable building materials out there, gingerbread has one thing going for it: It's tasty -- much tastier bamboo or, I'm sure, adobe. And many attractive houses have been made from it, particularly around this time of year.

But to the critical question: How does it perform? Fortunately, two engineering students at the University of British Columbia have grappled with this problem and come up with answers.

Using gingerbread that had been shaped into building materials, including I-beams, Mercedes Duifhuis and Sean Heisler (left) wrote a 32-page paper on gingerbread's strength in compression, bending, and tension. To find out exactly how the cookie crumbles, they suspended weights from gingerbread beams and stacked books on top of the stuff. They did not apply frosting to the gingerbread, which might have affected the strength tests.

The fats used to make...

The state Supreme Court in Oklahoma has ruled that Oklahoma State University does have the right to use eminent domain to acquire property owned by two brothers to develop a $316-million athletic complex, according to local reports.

The ruling directs the university and the homeowners back to a lower court to determine how much the university should pay for the property. The McCloskey brothers bought the house in 2005 for $25,000. The university has offered as much as $62,000 for it, but the brothers wanted $89,000.

In one of the claims of their case, the McCloskeys contended that the makeup of the university's Board of Regents was unconstitutional because the majority of members were not farmers, as required by law. The court rejected that argument.

The case closely follows a ruling in New York, where a court blocked a state agency from using eminent domain to acquire property for a ...

Deferred maintenance problems are causing huge headaches at the University of Utah, where a life-sciences building has been shut down after heating pipes burst and sprayed water throughout parts of the building. The Salt Lake Tribune reported on the problem on Monday.

Remi Barron, a spokesman for the university, told The Chronicle that the campus has about $700-million in deferred maintenance. "A lot of people can't understand how we have these ongoing costs when we are putting up new buildings," he said.

In some cases, the university is tearing down old buildings to put the new ones up, he said. But it seems that the problems in making ends meet on maintenance at the University of Utah are the same that you would see anywhere else: that is, that money for new buildings and money for maintenance come out of a different buckets.

The Rocky Mountain Institute has released a guidebook that outlines various efforts to reduce carbon emissions on campuses, and details some of the best practices. The report, "Accelerating Campus Climate Initiatives: Breaking Through Barriers," is available free on the institute's Web site.

As the title suggests, the report addresses various "perceived barriers" to progress on reducing emissions: "Campus leaders think energy management systems are prohibitively expensive" or "Most students pay little attention to campus climate initiatives," to name a couple. Then the report offers advice on how to get around those barriers.

For example, the report mentions a common barrier concerning the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program: "The administration regards LEED certification as an unnecessary expense." The report says sustainability...