Our item last week about the floods at Iowa State University—along with alarming reports about the heat waves and flooding around the world—got me thinking about the mayhem that wacky weather will bring to colleges and what colleges are doing to prepare. I'd love to get your perspectives in the comments below.

Two years ago, following the disastrous floods at the University of Iowa, The Chronicle ran a story on this very topic, in which we quoted analysts from insurance companies who are trying to grapple with the risks of climate change. Of course, one cannot connect any single weather event, like the Iowa floods, to climate change—but the overall trends are unsettling, even to scientists who are cautious about making such links. The trends in climate, at least, are fairly clear: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that July 2010 was the second-warmest on record...

National Public Radio's Ira Flatow will host a discussion about sustainability at colleges and universities on tomorrow's segment of Science Friday. The teaser from the Web site: "As students prepare to return to college campuses across the U.S., we'll talk about energy use and ecological activities on college campuses. What are educational institutions doing to go green? We'll talk about what some campuses are doing, from low-energy lighting and recycling efforts, to intensive environmental education."

I'll be one of the guests, along with Avital Binshtock from Sierra magazine and Benjamin Jakubowski, a student from Oberlin College.

It may be silly to burn a lot of time looking over the numbers on Sierra magazine's "Cool Schools" list, but people who are really interested in the methodology behind it might find this useful.

I was curious about why Stanford University shot up 19 places on the list in one year—from 26th to 5th place—when it's likely that very little changed at the university.

The university earned more points for its energy sources. But in looking at the 2009 survey and this year's survey, I confirmed that Stanford's energy mix—98 percent natural gas and 2 percent solar for electricity; 100 percent natural gas for heating—was the same. But it's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison, since  questions on the two surveys are slightly different and it's not clear how Sierra calculated Stanford's four points in this category in 2009. The editors have said they weighted energy differently this...

Gosh, what a difference a year makes in Sierra magazine's list of "Cool Schools," its ranking of green colleges. Last year, the University of Colorado at Boulder ranked No. 1, while Green Mountain College was 35th. This year, CU is at 13th and Green Mountain is tops.

Dickinson College went from 19th in 2009 to No. 2, and Stanford University zoomed up from 26th to 5th. Yale University went from 14th to 26th, and Emory University fell 10 notches to 42nd.

You might assume from such fluctuations that sustainability programs went haywire in the past year. But little changed, it seems, other than Sierra's ranking methodology. Energy issues were given more weight in this year's survey, Sierra editors say, but that answer probably won't satisfy the longtime critics of these green ratings.

The rating and ranking game has moved into college sustainability programs, to the great frustration of...

The most interesting thing about a GreenBiz story on the Princeton Review's 2011 Green Rating Honor Roll is not necessarily the list of distinguished colleges. Rather, it's a testy little back-and-forth between an anonymous commenter and David Soto, the company's director of college ratings. The whole thing might highlight just how imprecise and subjective the business of green ratings can be.

The article lists the 18 colleges that got the Princeton Review's highest rating for green efforts. Certainly, many of those on the list—like Arizona State University, Unity College, Warren Wilson College, College of the Atlantic—have lots of street cred for their green efforts. The efforts of others, like West Virginia University and Northeastern University, might be less well known.

But the anonymous commenter homed in on one angle: None of the names on the honor roll were signatories of a...

A bunch of Web sites are buzzing about the Geisel Library at the University of California at San Diego, designed by William Pereira and built in 1970, and its resemblance to the snow fortress in Inception. The site MovieFill provides the most colorful analysis, saying that the two buildings look "a little too similar for mere coincidence." 

"The same building was used as an exterior in Killer Tomatoes Strike Back," the writer says. (Wikipedia notes that the building has been used in other movies.) 

Then the writer goes on to complain that the building is overexposed, seen all over the university's marketing material -- and elsewhere: "Once, I even met an Asian dude who had a picture of it tattooed on his shoulder.  I’m not sure if him being Asian is relevant, but it was pretty weird." 

Fargo, N.D. — Everyone knows that agriculture is a major part of the economy in North Dakota, but perhaps not so many realize just how much of an agricultural powerhouse the state is. Agriculture composes about 25 percent of the gross state product, and about 80 percent of that is related to crops. Moreover, agricultural production in North Dakota has skyrocketed in recent years, as well as become more diverse, in part because of widespread adoption of biotech crops.

"The industry looks to us as the primary R&D group essentially developing the technology and informaiton that is vital for their future and ability to be competitive," D.C. Coston, vice president for agriculture and university extension at North Dakota State University, said when I visited recently. One of the key parts of that mission is developing new breeds of crops. Some observers here say agricultural scientists in...

Those who still have high hopes for a renewable-energy economy in the United States will want to see a ceremony this week as an exercise of good will between nations—not a passing of the torch.

Unity College, in Maine, will give two solar panels to a Chinese solar-energy entrepreneur, to be placed in a museum in China. These aren't just any old solar panels. They are part of an array of 32 panels that once produced hot water for the White House during President Jimmy Carter's administration, but were taken down when Ronald Reagan took office.

Huang Ming, the founder and chairman of the Himin Solar Energy Group, one of the largest solar-energy companies in the world, will acquire the two panels on Thursday at Unity College. He plans to give them to the Solar Science and Technology Museum, in Dezhou, billed as China's "Solar City." The ceremony coincides with a new documentary by two...

Unity, Me.—How often do new presidential houses really inspire people to think outside the box? The Unity House, at Unity College, in Maine, might be one of the rare few.

My colleague Lawrence Biemiller visited this house while it was under construction in 2008, and I stopped by the college recently to get an update. There I met Mitchell S. Thomashow, president of Unity, and his wife, Cindy, who gave me a short tour of the innovative house, which has earned a platinum rating under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.

This $400,000 modular house—built in a warehouse in pieces and later transported to the site and assembled—is a prototype designed by a program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and built by a New Hampshire-based timber-frame company called Bensonwood Homes, which is run by Tedd Benson, an old friend of Mr. Thomashow's. People from...

Ashley Thorne, of the National Association of Scholars, wrote me recently to say that she had quoted one of my recent articles in her latest salvo against sustainability in higher education. Her piece—as I read it, anyway—tries to dissect the role of ethics in sustainability: Is higher education engaging sustainability because it's an inherently virtuous thing to do, or because it's in our best interest, or what?

I'll leave it to others to grapple with her arguments about the social component of sustainability and the motivations behind sustainability programs. But I should correct her misinterpretation—or misrepresentation—of my article.

Ms. Thorne bemoans the notion that (in her view) people pursue sustainability for amorphous "virtuous" reasons, and not for more-measurable reasons, like saving money on electric bills. Then she alludes to a blog item I wrote about a roundtable...