Building Dashboard 2010 from Stephen Diehl on Vimeo.

Kilowatts and carbon emissions are essentially invisible -- until the electric bill comes. But many colleges have discovered that if you show people how much energy they are using in real time, they might be more inclined to save. That realization has led to all sorts of sophisticated displays that show energy-use rates climbing -- or polar bears drowning -- as lights, video games, computers, and other equipment power up.

Middlebury College has produced a short video on an energy- and water-use monitor that has been installed in its Franklin Environmental Center. In the video, Jack Byrne, Middlebury's sustainability director, explains how the device works and what the college hopes to get out of it.

"This has already achieved one of the things that we hoped would happen -- and that is that it engages visitors to the...

A number of sustainability rankings have popped up in recent years, and people have debated their value. Well, here's another one: The Roberts Environmental Center of Claremont McKenna College has adapted its Pacific Sustainability Index—which grades the ways that organizations report and publicize their sustainability efforts on their Web sites—to the college market. For several years now, the center's index has been used to grade top companies in various industrial sectors, like aerospace and defense, food services, mining, and so on.

J. Emil Morhardt, a professor of environmental biology and director of the Roberts Environmental Center, says that the index encourages a positive feedback loop in the quest for good PR: "When they start reporting, they tend to look more closely at what they are doing."

The center's report examined the top 50 liberal-arts colleges, as ranked by an...

Yet more discussion about the future of coal at colleges in Missouri -- the latest round is at the University of Missouri at Columbia, where the power plant burns some 130,000 tons of coal a year. Coal Free Mizzou, a student group formed and influenced by the Sierra Club, is pressing the university to look for alternatives, reports The Maneater, the student newspaper.

The anticoal groups are opposed by others, like the College Republicans, who assert that environmentalists haven't presented viable, affordable alternatives to coal. Bruce Nilles, who directs the Sierra Club's anticoal campaign, responds that there are several good alternatives, and that the cost of running the coal plant can only go up.

In an editorial, The Maneater says the anticoal forces need to be "more realistic" about alternative power sources. "Sure, coal use is bad," it says. "Yeah, it's detrimental to the...

The University of Nebraska at Lincoln is giving people an opportunity to propose uses for its Industrial Arts Building, a 97-year-old structure on the old state fairgrounds that preservationist fear will be demolished. The university says that if suitable plans for the building are not submitted before July 1, the building will indeed be razed. The university acquired the old fairgrounds last month to build a research park.

According to the Lincoln Journal Star, the building has slowly deteriorated over time. Costs of repairing the roof and stabilizing the structure are estimated at $2.4-million to $6.1-million. The cost of demolition is a point of debate: Harvey Perlman, the university's chancellor, puts it at about $375,000. Preservationists cite a figure of $1.5-million.

The building, which has been closed since 2004, does not fit into the plan for the research park and probably...

Lane Community College, which has built a reputation as a leader in environmental initiatives, is going to have to scale back on some of its green ambitions because of costs. Plans for the college's solar-powered electric-car charging station were more expensive than originally estimated; the college will have one charging station for 18 cars, instead of two for 36, according to The Register-Guard, in Eugene, Ore.

College officials tell the newspaper that they had a hard time estimating the cost of the facility, because of the variables -- such as the prospect of pumping electricity back to the grid in the initial years, when there are few electric cars on the road.

That is an issue that critics of the project have raised: Why is the college building a $675,000 charging station when there are only 400 electric cars in all of Oregon? Todd Wynn of the Cascade Policy Institute -- a...

Mount St. Mary’s University has struck a deal with Constellation Energy that will allow the electricity supplier to set up a 17.1-megawatt solar array on 100 of the university's 1,400 acres. The panels will be similar to those set up recently at the University of Toledo (pictured at left), a project that Constellation was also involved in.

Mount St. Mary's will get 1.2 megawatts of electricity, or 10 percent of the campus consumption, from the array. Christian A. Kendzierski, a spokesman for the university, said that the institution was still working out the financial details of the agreement.

Constellation will take and sell the renewable-energy credits, or RECs, from the 1.2 megawatts to offset the cost of the project for Mount St. Mary's. The University System of Maryland will purchase and retire the RECs from the remaining 15.9 megawatts, said Aaron Koos, a spokesman for...

The Lexington Herald-Leader reports that Kentucky's state colleges face a choice this year: Get money to build, or get money to maintain.

"The clear message is that they're unlikely to get both," the newspaper says. "Lawmakers will decide in the coming weeks whether to fund the $37-million over two years in utility bills for university buildings set to open or make debt payments on up to $583.8-million in new projects on the campuses -- or in the worst-case scenario, neither."

That doesn't seem like an especially difficult decision. Colleges have had trouble keeping up with maintenance on their campuses, and that alarming problem seems to be growing. Jim Simpson, who directs the higher-education division at Johnson Controls, recently told me that his company estimated that deferred maintenance was a $36-billion problem among colleges.

At the same time, depressed materials prices and a...

The University of Arizona has gotten $15-million in federal stimulus money to build an underground animal-research facility for its biomedical campus in Phoenix. According to the Phoenix Business Journal, the university's College of Medicine teamed up with Arizona State University to get the grant from the National Institutes of Health. Private companies will use space in the facility, too.

The Business Journal notes that the university is also seeking money to expand its pharmacy school and its optical-science research space.

The underground vivarium will be used primarily to support rodent research animals, according to local coverage. The amount of money that research universities -- particularly those with medical schools -- pour into facilities for the humble research mouse would probably surprise most people. Michael Anft, a former staff writer at The Chronicle of Philanthropy,...

For decades, the Senator Theatre was the venue where the biggest films made their Baltimore premieres. John Waters, Barry Levinson, and other Charm City filmmakers revealed their works to the world first in this grand, old-style moviehouse.

So last year, when the Senator closed, people wondered what would be in store for the Art Deco structure, which opened in 1939. The Senator, in the Govans neighborhood just south of the Towson area, near both affluent and impoverished neighborhoods. Across the street is an old department store that has been renovated into high-end shops and restaurants.

Now Towson University has stepped forward with a plan to renovate and save the Senator. According to the Baltimore Sun, the plan would transform the theater into a multipurpose performing-arts center and the new home for WTMD, the college's public-radio station.

The main competitor for Towson's...

Editorials in the student newspaper at Washington University in St. Louis dissect the recently released draft of the university's sustainability plan and raise an issue that activists on the campus have been making noise about lately: the university's ties to the coal industry through its Board of Trustees. Steven F. Leer, chief executive officer of Arch Coal Inc., and Gregory H. Boyce, chief executive officer of Peabody Energy, recently joined the board, which has ignited student activists who are opposed to coal energy. (Gary L. Rainwater, the executive chairman of the Ameren Corporation, an electric and gas utility that relies heavily on coal, is also on the board.)

Critics have argued that such ties to big coal run counter to the university's sustainability commitments -- particularly its commitment to cut its emissions. A conference on the future of energy held at the university...