The academic world is its own little terrarium that ends up affecting the broader cultural ecosystem. Universities are relatively (though not completely) removed from the economic cycle, so they tend to be stable employers. Students spend their three, four, or five years immersed in new ideas, meeting new people, and managing a set of new responsibilities. Faculty members do research, teach students, and talk to other people all day in an attempt to find out new things. It all filters into the world that the rest of us live in, although not always directly.

College students often take up causes, some of which they continue to pursue after graduation. A popular cause is the environment. Does student activism make a difference? The annual College Sustainability Report Card, released early this month, attempts to measure the influence of students and others in making campuses more sustainable. The report is prepared by the staff of the Responsible Endowments Institute, an organization that evaluated campus governance and endowment investing and is supported by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. This is the third year of the study, which now tracks the 300 colleges with the largest endowments as well as another 32 campuses that asked to participate.

The study evaluates campus facilities, student life, and endowment policies to grade different schools. Campuses can pick up points for green buildings, bringing organic produce into the dining halls, or committing part of the endowment to investments in sustainable technologies. The researchers focus on the money for two reasons. First, it gives some clues about the administration’s approach to transparency and engagement. Second, the more money a college has, the more it can spend on such things as LEED-certified buildings and alternative-fuel shuttle buses. It’s not necessarily a surprise that Harvard has an A- (the highest possible grade this year) and Youngstown State University is a D+. (more…)