College Given Green Grade of A-
By A.S. Erickson | Sunday, November 18, 2007
The Sustainable Endowments Institute recently published their annual report card. The report card examines how successful the 200 universities and colleges in the United States and Canada with the largest endowments are at instituting environmentally friendly practices. This most recent report card put Dartmouth College at an A-, the highest grade given out. Only five other schools also received the same grade: Harvard University, Middlebury College, University of Washington, University of Vermont, and Carleton College. Only four schools received an F: Juilliard School, Howard University, Regent University, and Samford University.
What singled Dartmouth out as better than the other 97% of schools? Each school was given a grade in 8 different areas: Administration (B), Climate Change & Energy (B), Food & Recycling (A), Green Building (A), Transportation (B), Endowment Transparency (A), Investment Priorities (B), Shareholder Engagement (A). The eight categories are split into two further sub-groups: the first five fall under the heading of campus sustainability, while the latter three under endowment sustainability. Dartmouth was further singled out as one of only three schools with an A- in the three endowment categories; the other two schools were Carleton and Williams. Dartmouth’s A- is the same grade it received in last year’s report card. The breakdown of all 200 schools is as follows: three percent received an “A”; twenty-eight percent received a “B”; forty-two percent received a “C”; twenty-five percent received a “D”; and two percent received an “F.”
In most corners of the campus this news has been heralded as unadulterated good news. Some questions remain however. First and foremost amongst some minds is how much is all of this good stewardship costing the College. The Institute as proof of an overall trend towards greener campuses listed popular movements at many other schools in their press release.
The results [in the report card] clearly show a “green groundswell” on campuses, with nearly 45 percent of colleges committing to fight climate change through cutting caron emissions. High-performance green building standards guide new construction at 59 percent of schools, while 42 percent are using hybrid or electric vehicles in transportation fleets. Notably, 37 percent of schools purchase renewable energy and 30 percent produce their own wind or solar energy. A substantial 70 percent buy food from local farms and 64 percent serve fair trade coffee.
Let’s take a closer look at what the report card singles out as exemplary at Dartmouth. It is important to keep in mind that the Sustainable Endowments Institute apparently did not independently verify much of what the College told them. The Dartmouth Review requested more information on their techniques of verification, if any. As of press time, the Institute had not responded—after more than a week and a half.
In the administration, there is a position for a sustainability coordinator—the office was occupied, until recently, by Jim Merkel. Merkel was pleased with the progress he had made during his short stay with the College, but one critique he did offer up was about the nature of the office he occupied. Like any good bureaucrat he was critical of the lack of power in his hands; his suggestion was for the College to upgrade his vacated position from coordinator to director. Amongst other accrued powers in this new office would be the power to veto building plans for not being green enough. This current lack of a higher up office in the administration is presumably the reason why Dartmouth didn’t receive an A in this category.
The efforts of the College in the Climate Change & Energy category revolve around renewable energy. The report card noted that Dartmouth has some solar panels as a source for power—the effects of which are negligible at best. More costly still is the fact that Dartmouth purchases “2,000 megawatt-hours of renewable energy per year.” In a grid system like that of the United States, the ability to exactly determine where your electricity comes from is problematic. Electricity is fungible; once it’s dumped into the grid it’s impossible to distinguish where the electricity coming out of one’s outlet originated.
Everyone is familiar with the maddening system of recycling and composting in use at places like the Home Plate dining hall. To the administration’s credit the process of sorting one’s meal no longer falls on students, who were either apathetic or confused. This led to Dartmouth Dining Services (DDS) needing to have a person police the compost section full time. In a move towards sanity DDS now has a professional sorter who takes care of all the composting.
The primary basis, it seems, for the A in how Dartmouth builds rests on the College’s interaction with a program known as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). LEED measures proposed buildings in six ways: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, innovation and design process. The system is a bit confusing, but it seems to have “prerequisites” for each category, which are required, and “credits” for each category, the number of which gives one a sense of how environmentally righteous a particular building is.
Why the College didn’t get an A in Transportation is beyond me; it certainly throws enough money at the issue. Dartmouth contributes over $400,000 to Advance Transit (the Upper Valley public transportation system) and other regional modes of transportation. In addition to this, the College currently owns twelve hybrid vehicles.
As noted in the press release sent out by the Institute, Dartmouth is a leader in what amounts to green investing. The College has set up the Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR) to get recommendations from faculty, students, administrators, and alumni on how best to invest when social or environmental issues are at stake. The College’s proxy has never rejected the ACIR’s recommendations. While the proxy should probably be focused on maximizing return, It seems that the recommendations put forth by the ACIR are not too stringent; DDS does, after all, still serve Coke products. Particularly lauditory in this category is the transparency of what the College invests its endowment in. One can read the ACIR’s annual report on the school’s website, and “any Dartmouth community member can view a hard-copy listing of all publicly traded shares that the college directly owns by visiting the college’s investment office.” If only the rest of the administration was so transparent. n
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