Elizabeth Coleman, president of Bennington College, calls for a reinvention of the liberal arts in this stirring talk at the 2009 TED Conference, which was recently released on TED’s Web site. She says the liberal arts should focus on broad subject areas relevant to the problems of today — health, equity, the environment, education, governance, and the uses of force — and colleges should re-engage the communities around them. Her vision shares much with that of some leading sustainability advocates.

The alternative, she explains, is irrelevance — or worse:

We have professionalized the liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature. Over the past century, the expert has...

Bar code: Students drew inspiration from UPC symbols in designing shelving in the architecture school at the State U. of New York at Buffalo. (Photo by Doug Levere)

I took a recent trip to upstate New York to visit a few colleges, and I made a stop at the architecture school at the State University of New York at Buffalo. There, Brian Carter, the dean, has students working on what he calls “small projects” — efforts to redesign much-used public spaces, both to enliven the surroundings and to give students real training.

Mr. Carter, who is British, says there are many opportunities in Europe for young architects to participate in competitions and get their names out there. One of the difficulties of being a young architect in America is that there are too few opportunities to break into the field and show one’...

The City of Boston has approved Boston College’s $1-billion expansion plan, according to The Boston Globe. The city requires the college to start its projects with an undergraduate residence hall.

The expansion plan has been a sore point between the college and the neighborhood that surrounds it. (See articles here, here, and here.) Even after the plan was approved by the city,...

Robert Coombe, chancellor of the University of Denver, and John Hickenlooper, mayor of Denver, celebrate the beginning of a bike-sharing program started by two students, Mary Jean O’Malley and Zoee Turrill, at right. (University of Denver photo)

USA Today recently featured a story about two recent University of Denver graduates who have started a “bike library” for students at the university, which will serve as a pilot for a bike-sharing program for the city of Denver starting next spring. The story says that 600 bikes will be placed at 40 kiosks around the city, with two kiosks at the University of Denver.

The students, Mary Jean O’Malley and Zoee Turrill, got the help of the student senate and some university departments to raise $50,000 to start the program. (It’s not clear what the city will ...

Paul Rowland, dean of the College of Education at the University of Idaho, has been picked to become the new executive director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, a leading sustainability group. A news release indicates that Mr. Rowland has had background in sustainability issues, but his professional focus on education, rather than environmental policy or a similar field, may indicate that AASHE will emphasize sustainability in the classroom in the future.

An intersection that Malcolm Wells designed while teaching at Harvard University: “I was what was known as a flop,” he writes of his experience there. “I couldn’t talk architecture.” (Images courtesy Malcom Wells/Chelsea Green Publishing)

The careers of architects are littered with buildings that never found a client or a budget and never emerged from the ground. Those buildings exist merely as dreams of what could have been — and dreams of the world they might have helped create.

Dream buildings sometimes leave architects amused, sometimes bitter. Rarely are they as entertaining and as poignant as Malcolm Wells, the pioneer of underground architecture. The Earth-Sheltered House, which has just...

The Wisconsin state legislature’s Joint Finance Committee has approved 36 projects in the University of Wisconsin system, the Associated Press reports.

UW System building and maintenance projects would receive $380-million in taxpayer support and another $486-million in student fees, private donations and other non-tax sources under the plan pending in the Legislature.

The committee included all 34 projects that had been recommended by the State Building Commission and added two more to the state budget at the last minute. Those were a $47-million building for the nursing school at UW-Madison and a $44-million academic building at UW-Eau Claire.

State officials said that the building projects would act as an economic stimulus.

Declining reserves of oil and gas — and now declining wind? Here’s an Associated Press news item for any of the many colleges considering erecting wind turbines to generate power: We may have a less-windy country in years to come, thanks to climate change.

The wind, a favorite power source of the green energy movement, seems to be dying down across the United States. And the cause, ironically, may be global warming — the very problem that wind power seeks to address.

The idea that winds may be slowing is still a speculative one, and scientists disagree whether that is happening. But a first-of-its-kind study suggests that average and peak wind speeds have been noticeably slowing since 1973,...

Six state universities in Kansas will get $7.7-million in federal stimulus money to spend on deferred maintenance projects. But it’s only a drop in the bucket — Kansas’s six state colleges are facing some $825-million in deferred-maintenance bills, a fact that The Chronicle noted earlier this year. The Morning Sun, a newspaper in Pittsburg, Kan., breaks down the bill by state institution:

Kansas State University: $291-million The University of Kansas: $226-million The KU Medical Center: $90.5-million Pittsburg State University: $67-million Fort Hays State University: $51-million Emporia State University: $50.6-million Wichita State University: $49.3-million

The Sun notes that the Kansas Legislature will...

Plans at Pitt: The Associated Press reports that the University of Pittsburgh will soon start a $60.2-million expansion plan. The plan calls for a $32.4-million renovation of a science center and the construction of a $27.8-million Olympic sports complex for men’s baseball, women’s softball, and soccer programs.

Green, Tech, Ed: The University of Oregon recently opened a 67,000-square-foot education building that is one of the most technologically advanced on the campus. The remodeled building also features several green features, like solar hot water and bioswales, which capture and clean runoff.

Growth Spurt at a Small School:...