THE GREENEST CAMPUSES: AN IDIOSYNCRATIC GUIDE
By Noel Perrin
Brown and Yale have found a country way of dealing with tons of food waste. Pigs
About 1,100 American colleges and cities run at least a token environ-mental-studies program, and many hundreds of those programs offer well-designed and useful courses. But only a drastically
smaller number practice even a portion of what they teach. The one exception is recycling. Nearly every institution that has so much as one lonely environmental-studies course also does a little halfhearted recycling. Paper and glass, usually.
There are some glorious exceptions to those rather churlish observations, I’m glad to say. How many? Nobody knows. No one has yet done the necessary research (though the National Wildlife Federation’s Campus Ecology program is planning a survey).
Certainly U.S. News & World Report hasn’t. Look at the rankings in their annual college issue. The magazine uses a complex formula something like this: Institution’s reputation, 25 percent; student- retention rate, 20 percent; faculty resources, 20 percent; and so on, down to alumni giving, 5 percent. The lead criterion may help explain why Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Universities so frequently do a little dance at the top of the list.
But U.S. News has nothing at all to say about the degree to which a college or university attempts to behave sustainably — that is, to manage its campus and activities in ways that promote the long-term health of the planet. The magazine is equally mum about which of the institutions it is ranking can serve as models to society in a threatened world.
And, of course, the world is threatened. When the Royal Society in London and the National Academy
of Sciences in Washington issued their first-ever joint statement, it ended like this: “The future of our planet is in the balance. Sustainable developme
