You’ve got to hand it to those Cooper Union students. They’re great designers — and mischievous. Amid a debate on campus over what to do about the institution’s financial crisis — and whether to start charging tuition at Cooper for the first time in some 110 years — a student has put up his own protest, in a way that only a clever designer could.

A letter from Jamshed Bharucha, Cooper’s president, circulated with a stunning announcement: Cooper would lease its academic building at 41 Cooper Square — the signature building designed by the starchitect Thom Mayne — to the Polytechnic Institute of New York University for  $20 million in annual revenue. The letter went on to say that Cooper would relocate its operations to “one of New York’s neighboring boroughs.” The letter went on to say that Mr. Bharucha would move out of the president’s residence at 21 Stuyvesant Street, known as…

Read More

The Sustainable Endowments Institute has announced that it is suspending its production of the College Sustainability Report Card. The report card was one of the first and most controversial of several sustainability-ratings systems that have popped up in recent years. It was followed by a slew of other ratings and rankings that attempted to grade colleges on their green efforts.

In a letter to colleges, Mark Orlowski, the founder and executive director of the Sustainable Endowments Institute, wrote that his organization would instead focus on its Billion Dollar Green Challenge, an effort to get colleges to invest in energy-efficiency projects.

The letter indicated that SEI’s donors were pushing the institute away from the report card. “Funders are giving preference to the proactive mission of the Billion Dollar Green Challenge, thus leaving limited resources to produce the next…

Read More

On Wednesday, the presidents of nine Washington, D.C., institutions signed a pledge to support a plan to make Washington the most sustainable city in the nation. The pledge’s backers say they seek to declare D.C. the nation’s “greenest college town”—an audacious claim, given the competition from places like Boulder, Colo.; Burlington, Vt.; and Portland, Ore.

The pledge grew out of a plan to improve the city’s climate action plan, introduced early last year under Mayor Vincent Gray. “While the climate action plan had concrete measures to address government-sector emissions, the community center emissions was a little abstract—they weren’t sure how they were going to mobilize sections of the community on climate change,” says Josh Lasky, the sustainability manager at the University of the District of Columbia, where the pledge was first discussed. “We organized this meeting to say, …

Read More

The University of Vermont will stop sales of bottled water on campus within a year, adding to a small but growing number of institutions that have done so. Vermont administrators said the drive to stop bottled-water sales was led by students. The university has set up bottle-filling stations (pictured at the left) around campus to prepare for the contract’s end.

An announcement about the move noted that the university would not renew its contract with Coca-Cola, which had exclusive “pouring rights” on the campus and sold about 1.1 million bottles of beverages there each year. Dining services, cafes, and retail stores on campus “will choose a mix of beverages through their own national contracts and local connections, allowing for greater flexibility in addressing environmental and social values in relation to the beverages supplied,” the announcement says.

There was real money tied…

Read More

The White House has announced that some college and university buildings will be part of a $4-billion program to improve energy efficiency over the next two years. The program—which is part of the Better Buildings Initiative, an effort to improve building efficiency by 20 percent—will get $2-billion from government agencies through a  presidential memorandum, and colleges and universities, cities, private companies, and other entities will collectively contribute the other $2-billion.

Allegheny College, Delaware State University, the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, Michigan State University, the University of California at Irvine, the University of Hawaii-Manoa, and the University of Utah will be part of the program.

Allegheny College, for example, will reduce energy consumption by 20 percent in 1.3-million square feet of space by 2020, and the Kentucky…

Read More

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is publishing a series of articles about gas drilling in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and its effects on and connections to higher-education institutions. (The Chronicle ran an article about gas drilling in the region last year, when colleges were just beginning to be approached by drillers.)

The first article in the series focuses on institutions that have struck deals with drilling companies, which use a controversial technique called “hydraulic fracturing,” or simply “fracking.” (Fracking involves boring down into shale, then using water, chemicals, and explosives to release the gas from the tight rock. Critics worry that the process can contaminate the environment, including groundwater.)

The article initially focuses on California University of Pennsylvania, where the nonprofit student association granted a company drilling rights on 67 acres…

Read More

“Mean Green” indeed: The new stadium at the University of North Texas got a platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council.

The New York Times carried a story this week about how the sports industry is embracing environmental sensibilities — perhaps a surprising and encouraging development, given that big-time sports “represent the broadest cross-section of consumer culture and America’s wasteful ways,” as the article put it.

But it appears to be a trend, and not one found in the usual places. “You would expect it out of a California team, but not an Arizona team,” said Derrick Hall, the chief executive of the Arizona Diamondbacks, which had added solar panels to its baseball field.

How about a Texas team? Unmentioned in the article was the honor unveiled this week for the new stadium at the University of North Texas. It appears to be the first newly constructed …

Read More

Perkins + Will designed a student-services building that won a sustainability award at this year’s conference for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education announced its 2011 Sustainability Awards.

Among the winners was Peggy Barlett, a professor of anthropology at Emory University, who won the inaugural award for faculty sustainability leadership. Ms. Barlett’s work on local foods was featured in a 2008 Chronicle article.

The Innovation in Green Building Award, which was also an inaugural award, went to a student services building at the University of Texas at Dallas designed by Perkins + Will.

Washington University won the Best “Lessons Learned” Case Study Award — a honor that goes to institutions that come clean about sustainability plans that didn’t go as planned….

Read More

The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education has released a new online database that tracks solar installations on college campuses. The database shows that solar power has grown by 450 percent over the last three years, to a total capacity of 137 megawatts, or enough to power 40,000 homes. Higher-education solar installations in 2010 represented a $300-million market and 5.4 percent of all solar power installed in the U.S. that year.

Niles Barnes, the projects coordinator for AASHE, said that the growth in solar could be attributed to the declining cost of installations, in part because of government incentives.

“For all the campuses that don’t have solar installations, we are trying to show them what’s possible,” Mr. Barnes says. “I think this is going to be inspiring to people.”

The database, which was made free to the public because of a solar…

Read More

WaterShed, a solar home designed by students from the University of Maryland, incorporated water-conservation and -filtering features into its design.

The University of Maryland’s solar house—dubbed WaterShed—has come out on top in the 2011 Solar Decathlon. The team of students and their advisers from Maryland bested 18 other teams from various colleges to take the top prize in the contest, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. The Solar Decathlon rates the student-designed and -built houses on aesthetics, energy efficiency, market appeal, and other attributes.

WaterShed was unusual among houses that have been in the contest in the sense that it had a focus on water use, stormwater, and greywater. The house’s designers said that they had taken inspiration from the plight of the Chesapeake Bay, which is choking on nutrients and other pollution. The house…

Read More