The big stories from this week’s AASHE Bulletin are the feature articles on campus sustainability in the special reports on higher ed in both Newsweek and Time Magazine. Talk about mainstream acceptance! Millions of prospective students, parents, higher education administrators, and others will be reading these magazines and learning about campus sustainability. It bodes well for what is shaping up to be another year of incredible growth in campus sustainability activities as new schools get involved and those already involved redouble their efforts.

It was wonderful to see that all but one of the US and Canadian campuses on Grist Magazine’s list of 15 “Green Colleges and Universities” are AASHE members, and almost 2/3 of the US campuses listed are signatories to the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment. That said, I have to say that lists like this with no real methodology shouldn’t be taken very seriously, especially since there’s no obvious distinction between the 15 and the runners up, and there are many institutions equally committed to sustainability that didn’t make the list, including previous winners of AASHE’s Campus Sustainability Leadership Awards like Warren Wilson College, Berea College, and Lane Community College. In fact, there’s not a single community college on Grist’s list, which is an unfortunate omission.

I sometimes think these kind of anecdotal lists of green campuses do more harm than good. Since they aren’t based on any criteria, they don’t offer any sort of road map for schools that want to get on the list next year. Moreover, because they are usually produced by non-experts and are based primarily on reputation and the strength of an institution’s marketing efforts, they tend to reinforce convention wisdom about who the leading schools are and almost always exclude lesser known, but perhaps more deserving schools. In saying this, I don’t mean to knock any of the schools who were recognized by Grist - all of whom are doing great things - but I wonder how different the list would have been if it were based on objective criteria.

What do you think about these type of lists?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 11:42 am and is filed under Julian Dautremont-Smith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.