Lynn University’s president, Kevin M. Ross, will get new digs, according to an article in the Palm Beach Post. The university’s trustees voted to buy a 3,600-square-foot home for $900,000.

The purchase comes in a year when faculty members were told they would not be getting raises, the article says. The board jumped on the property for two reasons: It is close to the campus, and with Florida real-estate prices depressed, it was a bargain.

“All the board members went to see the house to make sure it was suitable and not so ostentatious,” said Christine E. Lynn, the board chairman. “Compared to other presidential homes I’ve seen this one is modest.”

Some colleges are starting to look seriously at LED, or light-emitting diodes, for their lighting needs. Le Moyne College, in particular, is experimenting with LED bulb replacements that fit into the standard 2-by-4 fixtures one sees in every office. If Le Moyne replaced all 25,000 such bulbs across campus, the college could save money on its energy bills. The bulbs, which are pricey, would pay for themselves in about 10 years.

The college would also cut its emissions from purchased electricity by about 17 percent. Many colleges are now looking closely at ways to cut their electricity use, because electricity is often generated by burning a particularly dirty fuel: coal. Read more about LED lighting in an article from The Chronicle.

A new cancer center at the U. of California at San Francisco is winning praise for its interiors. (Photography by Michael O’Callahan)

The University of California at San Francisco has opened its Helen Diller Family Cancer Research Building, designed by Rafael Viñoly, on its Mission Bay campus. The reviews of the 164,000-square-foot lab building are mainly positive so far.

John King of the San Francisco Chronicle says that too many institutional architects regard their discipline as “two inches thick” — that is, that architects just pay attention to the skin of a building and little else. Mr. King must have mentioned this to Mr. Viñoly during his tour of the building....

A new building at Washington University in St. Louis will meet strict green-building standards. (Washington U. in St. Louis image)

Washington University in St. Louis has opened a living-learning building that is designed to meet the Living Building Challenge, one of the most demanding green-building rating systems in the world. The Living Building Challenge was developed by the Cascadia Region Green Building Council, the Northwest chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council.

The materials and techniques that are being used in the building are adventurous for a college structure. For starters, the living-learning center will be a net-zero-energy building, meaning it produces all of its energy needs, and it will produce no wastewater. The building will use solar power for its energy, and its roofs will capture...

The Associated Press reports that Syracuse University and IBM are teaming up to build a computer center that officials hope will be a model for green computing and green building.

The $12-million structure will have its own natural-gas cogeneration plant, which will produce steam for heat along with electricity. The fuel, natural gas, is cleaner than coal, which is used to generate electricity in most parts of the country. The data center is also expected to use half the energy of a typical data center. That’s important because data centers consume about 1.5 percent of the country’s energy generation — a figure that is expected to double by 2011, the article notes.

IBM will contribute $5-million to the project in the form of equipment and support. The New York State Energy Research and...

Given all the recent discussion on this blog about agriculture, horticulture, and sustainability, it seems fitting to recommend a little film that is touring the country right now: Fresh, a movie about sustainable agriculture. The movie stars people like Joel Salatin, who has become something of a farmer-celebrity since his appearance in The Omnivore’s Dilemma; Will Allen, an urban farmer from Milwaukee who recently won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship; and John E. Ikerd, a professor emeritus of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

For...

This blog noted on Wednesday that Washington State University would accept an offer from a donor to bring Michael Pollan to the campus to talk about his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The book had been dropped as the university’s common-reading selection — for either economic or political reasons, according to different points of view. The university, which has a prominent agriculture college, is weathering a $54-million cut in state money.

Now the university has announced that the book will be reinstated as the common-reading choice. Bill Marler, a personal-injury lawyer who specializes in food-safety issues, has vowed to cover the $40,000 it might cost to bring Mr. Pollan to the campus....

In the recent case of Washington State University’s dropping Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma as its “common reading” selection for the year, two rationales emerged: University officials said the reasons had to do with the institution’s dire budget outlook — there was just no money to bring in a big-name author like Mr. Pollan, they said. Meanwhile, some faculty members and others said the book was dropped because it attacks one of the university’s bases, Big Agriculture.

Well, Bill Marler, a Seattle-based personal-injury lawyer who specializes in food-poisoning cases and who has become something of a food-safety advocate, is throwing down the gauntlet. “Hey, Michael Pollan, I’ll pay your way to Pullman,” Mr. Marler, a Washington State alumnus, writes on

The Associated Press recently carried a story about a project at the University of Oregon to retrofit exercise equipment to generate electricity.

The story says that the amount of energy produced is “small,” but it seems significant for what is otherwise little more than a bunch of gerbil-wheel machines for people. “The university estimates that 3,000 people a day on 20 machines would generate 6,000 kilowatt hours a year, enough to power one small energy-efficient house in the Northwest.” The university consumes more than 2,000 times that amount, the story says.

Oregon State University has already hooked its own exercise machines. During a football game this fall, the two schools will compete to generate the most power. (The University of Florida’s pedal-power project is also...

Today’s Chronicle features a story about a controversy at Washington State University that should interest followers of sustainability and agriculture issues:

When a committee at Washington State University picked The Omnivore’s Dilemma as this year’s “common reading” selection for all incoming freshmen, faculty members effusively praised the award-winning book and hoped that people at the land-grant university were ready to have a serious debate about the practice of agriculture in America….

But it seems that discussion will not happen—at least not over The Omnivore’s Dilemma as a common-reading selection. Michael Pollan’s hard-hitting examination of industrial agriculture and the American diet has been dropped as the program’s text.

An explanation on the university’s Web site is vague and implies the withdrawal of the book was due to budget constraints...