(Updated on 10/29/2012 to note the family’s intent to appeal.)

A state judge in Montgomery County, Md., has ruled against a family who sued the Johns Hopkins University, seeking to block it from developing land that the family had sold to Hopkins in an effort to preserve it from rampant development.

Elizabeth Banks sold her Belward Farm to Johns Hopkins in 1988 at a tenth of the land’s value, with the understanding that the land would be used to build a campus. But the family of Ms. Banks, who died in 2005, says Hopkins’s current plan for 4.7 million square feet of development defies what she had intended. Her family was supported by neighbors, who were concerned about the traffic that the increased development might bring and offended by what they saw as the university’s disregard for Ms. Banks’s intentions.

The university maintained that the deed did not bar the planned…

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Students guide the oxen Bill and Lou, pulling a mower in healthier days (Green Mountain College image).

A couple of years ago, I visited Green Mountain College and toured the Vermont college’s post-petroleum farm, which instructs students in ways to conduct agriculture without fossil-fuel inputs. That means that animals do a lot of work on the farm, and the most essential of those animals were a pair of oxen, Lou and Bill. They were magnificent creatures—an embodiment of power, with long horns and formidable muscle under coats the color of creamed coffee.

My tour guides, Dayna Halprin and Laura Wolfgang, and I began talking about the fate of the animals on the farm. They are sent to slaughter or, as Ms. Wolfgang described, sometimes slaughtered by students themselves. As I recall, Ms. Halprin was a vegetarian…

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Tory Gattis, over at the other Chronicle (in Houston), has an idea for a prime piece of real estate in that Texas city. The 136-acre parcel—which is being sold by the engineering and construction company KBR—is near downtown, sits along the Buffalo Bayou, and has plenty of opportunities for green space. (See the red circle on the map below.)

“This parcel of land could be the last opportunity for Houston to add a major college campus to the city,” Mr. Gattis writes, noting that Houston has fewer colleges than many other major cities.

“We should consider something similar to what NYC just did with Roosevelt Island, where after a long evaluation process they awarded it to Cornell for a technology campus,” Mr. Gattis argues. “Of course the City of Houston doesn’t own the land, but it could be a facilitator … to open discussions with the landowner and various universities to…

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Two items of solar news affecting mid-Atlantic colleges have emerged lately—one good, one not so good.

In the good-news category, Maryland’s governor, Martin O’Malley, wielded a big pair of scissors for a ribbon-cutting last week at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he celebrated the installation of a 16.1-megawatt solar field. The field, as you can see, is vast, comprising 220,000 panels on 100 acres of land owned by Mount St. Mary’s.

Constellation Energy owns and operates the field, and has leased the land from the university. The company developed an additional 1.6-megawatt system on the site that will supply power to the campus.

In the not-so-good-news category, neighbors of Mercer County Community College, in New Jersey, have filed a lawsuit to stop a 45-acre solar project on that campus, reports The Times of Trenton. The neighbors argue that the eight-megawatt project…

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As you know, we here at The Chronicle’s Buildings & Grounds blog are not big believers in “best” or “top 10″ lists. But when this list of the “top 10 college towns of 2012″ arrived in my in box this morning, I couldn’t resist passing it along.

In doing so, I’m not saying the list is definitive—it’s put together by a publication called Livability, which I have never heard of. But I thought it would spur conversation about everyone’s favorite college towns.

And for starters, we need a basic definition of a college town. “True college towns are places where the identity of the city is both shaped by and complementary to the presence of its university, creating an environment enjoyable to all residents, whether they are enrolled in classes or not,” Livability’s editors write. “They’re true melting pots, where young minds meet old traditions, and political, social, and cultural ideas …

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For nearly a decade now, the University of Southern California has had a major construction plan in the works—a plan that would pump about $1-billion into a rundown area near the campus, transforming it into restaurants, shops, office space, and student housing. But residents of the area have protested the plan, arguing that it would displace the low-income families that have lived in the neighborhood for a long time. (Click here to listen to a debate about the gentrification issue on Los Angeles public radio.)

Now a committee of the Los Angeles City Council has responded to the protesters, putting the university’s project on hold and asking USC for more information about the displacement of residents in similar university projects across the country, according to the Los Angeles Times. The Times says the university offered $2-million to support low-income housing in the…

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