Burlington, Vt. — As I've stated on this blog a few times, I'm an avid vegetable gardener. So the new James M. Jeffords Hall, at the University of Vermont, is a building after my heart, mainly because of some design choices that are separate from the building itself.

But first, a little about the building: As the home for plant biology, soil sciences, and life sciences at the university, Jeffords Hall will house a lot of interesting and vital work in agriculture. The interior of the $55.7-million building, which was designed by Ellenzweig Associates, with the local architects Freeman French Freeman, is modestly and functionally elegant.

At 97,000 square feet, the building contains lots of lab and office space. It's shooting for a gold rating in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program—which would be quite an achievement, given the need for lab ventilation and other...

Tinmouth, Vt.—During my recent travels in the Northeast, I stopped at Solarfest, a festival where environmentally oriented people could attend seminars on sustainable farming and alternative energy, hear some famous speakers, buy hippie clothes and confrontational bumper stickers, and eat bean burgers.

I was here to meet Philip Ackerman-Leist, a professor at Green Mountain College who was giving a talk based on the subject of his new book, Up Tunket Road: The Education of a Modern Homesteader (Chelsea Green Publishing). The book, which recently got a glowing review in the Los Angeles Times, documents Mr. Ackerman-Leist's views on the homesteading movement, along with stories about his own sometimes-difficult journey back to the land. (He and his wife lived in an old Vermont cabin without electricity or running water for seven years before he built a small, off-grid house on their...

Boston -- In front of a room full of facilities managers last week, Ted Weidner opened his portion of a talk with a confession: The University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where he is assistant vice chancellor for facilities management and planning, had not signed the American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment, and he had been one of the main advisors to the university's president, advocating against signing.

Then he added that the night before he'd had dinner with Tony Cortese, who is a leading activist and advocate for the climate commitment, and after their conversation, he felt a little bad about arguing against the climate commitment.

But more on that later. The session here at the annual conference for APPA, the facilities management association, was billed as a discussion between Mr. Weidner and Georges Dyer, a climate-commitment advocate from the environmental or...

Boston—When I arrived at the annual APPA conference for college facilities managers, I picked up a program and homed in on a session called "Scandal and Headlines: Could It Happen to Your Facilities Organization?" And it was being led by administrators from New Mexico State University, an institution that has recently had some trouble staying out of headlines.

How could I resist?

Glen Haubold, assistant vice president of facilities, and Angela Throneberry, assistant vice president for business, finance, and human resources, opened their talk with a bit of disappointment: They were not going to detail the "malfeasance" that started to be uncovered in their facilities department in 2007.

"If you came to find out what happened, the lawyers won't let us tell you that," Mr. Haubold said. News reports at the time reveal that facilities employees may have engaged in fraud—including taking...

Minneapolis -- Any conference strings together a series of lessons and experiences, both the formal in the sessions and the informal in the hallways. For the journalist grazing at the meeting, that's a lot to absorb. What follows here are a series of thoughts and snippets that I collected in my notebook during the Society for College and University Planning's annual meeting. Forgive the randomness of some of these reports. Of course, I'm saving the best stuff for full-length stories in the near future, and I will probably also expound on some of the items below. Stay tuned. ...

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Some prominent SCUPers told me that colleges—particularly vulnerable institutions, like the small colleges and midsize universities—aren't taking the recession seriously enough. One well-known consultant told me that most colleges regard the economic climate like "a bad cold" that will pass. The reality, he...

Minneapolis -- Yesterday our blog quoted the campus planner Ira Fink, who said you should put a window in every faculty member's office. "People like to look outside," he said at the Society for College and University Planning's annual meeting.

Well, Kristin Raab would take that statement a step futher. People like to be outside—heck, they need to be outside. Ms. Raab, who is both a public-health expert and an adjunct professor of landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, spoke to a full room about campus landscaping that can reduce stress among students and faculty and staff members alike.

She started out detailing the ways that the college experience is stressful for students, never mind faculty members. Roughly half of male and female students cite some level of depression that interferes with their lives, and a study at the University of Minnesota showed...

Minneapolis -- Ira Fink, a well-known planning consultant, talked about using office space smartly on Monday at the Society for College and University Planning. In a packed room, he went over some of the history of space standards, which seem to be derived from 100-year-old studies of high-school classrooms.

Labs and research areas are big space eaters, he said, in part because they are owned by departments. And they are protected spaces, not always used well. You can get a sense of how often a room is used, he said, by walking in, looking for a newspaper, and checking the date. He once walked into a room and found a newspaper that was 10 years old.

Offices are also big space users—from what I've seen, they can consume up to a quarter of space on a campus. He showed pictures of faculty offices and noted that paper, whether piled on the desks or stashed in file cabinets, takes up a lot ...

Minneapolis — I led a discussion of sustainability on Monday at the annual meeting of the Society for College and University Planning. The lunchtime group, comprising institutional people and architects (along with consultants), was small, but the discussion was lively and frank. And at times it felt confessional, like a support-group meeting. (For that reason, I'll keep the names and institutions anonymous here.)

The conversation focused on the economic constraints on some sustainability efforts, the advantages that tight money might bring in helping to make the argument for sustainability, and the role that education can play—education of both students and administrators—in sustainability efforts.

Two officials of public universities, one from the South and one from the Southwest, said they faced big challenges in taking on sustainability efforts in this economy, particularly in...

Minneapolis -- Jerome Ringo, a prominent environmental activist, kicked off the annual meeting of the Society for College and University Planning with a talk about sustainability—but with an angle on the topic often overlooked by sustainability advocates on college campuses. Mr. Ringo, who is African-American and from the battered state of Louisiana, focused on racial and socioeconomic facets of sustainability—that is, how college sustainability programs often overlook the poor and the nonwhite.

"As I have traveled over the last several years and spoken to hundreds of students at colleges' campuses in this country, there is still a lack of involvement of minority students in the sustainability programs and the environmental programs," he said. "When you look at the statistics … people of color and poor people are disproportionately impacted when it comes to poor environmental...

The Hartford Courant reports that Trinity College is evicting longtime residents of an adjacent neighborhood so that it can tear down the houses to make room for a new dormitory. The college, which owns the houses, has had plans for the dorm since the 1990s.

The neighbors, some of whom have lived there for more than 10 years, had been notified earlier this year that they would have to leave by late summer. Still, some say that they have not been given enough time to find new housing, even with help from a relocation company. "They don't care about us as a community," Aurice Barlow, a resident for 13 years, told the newspaper.

A college official expressed sympathy for the residents' situation and told the Courant that Trinity had been as fair as possible in the relocation process.