Board approves OUS sustainability report

The Oregon University System has gone green. On Oct. 8, the Oregon State Board of Higher Education approved the Sustainability Initiative Committee’s [SIC] final report, which contained policy proposals for Oregon’s universities to adopt in the service of nurturing the state’s reputation as a nucleus of “green” development.   

The committee’s proposals include funding the education of graduate students pursuing degrees in sustainability-based disciplines, creating a Sustainability Incentive Fund to support innovations in sustainability-based teaching and outreach and holding university presidents accountable for an OUS sustainability policy.

Woven together across OUS campuses, these proposals will form a system-wide “tapestry” of green goals, said David Yaden, SIC chairman. However, none of these proposals are meant to override the sustainability proposals already in place on each of the individual campuses.

“The university presidents…will now work with the chancellor to develop a set of metrics and particularly to identify gaps that they think need to be filled,” Yaden said. “That will include teaching, curriculum, public service, research and campus operations.”

But it’s not easy going green. Yaden believes there are two obstacles standing in the way of successfully implementing the report’s proposals.

The major obstacle is Oregon’s fiscal reality. According to Yaden, though OUS would like to be able to fund collaborative research and to develop new academic courses and curricula that could be shared among campuses, it simply does not have the money.

The lesser obstacle, Yaden said, is each university’s sense of “institutional identity.”

For example, although Portland State is spearheading many sustainability projects, such as eco-districts, the university may be reluctant to submerge its reputation for such projects into OUS’s more systemic approach to sustainability.

“What we really want is for people around the world to think about Oregon’s efforts for sustainability functioning as a whole unit rather than as a bunch of separate units,” Yaden said.

According to Charles Triplett, OUS’s performance program manager, the university system’s goal is not to insist that every campus engage in identical sustainability projects, but to “create the connective tissue” that allows OUS to profit from the unique strengths each campus brings to bear on sustainability-related issues.

Once the Board managed to dispel system-wide rumors of a top-down prescriptive approach to sustainability, the various campuses “embraced [the SIC proposals] warmly,” Triplett said.

OUS created the SIC in November 2008 as a response to the work of the Academic Excellence and Economic Development Committee, according to Yaden. The Board eventually decided that a new committee should formulate a series of overarching goals to tie together some of the work being done on the individual campuses. In this way, OUS sustainability initiatives would amount to more than the sum of their parts.

According to Yaden, the formation of the SIC was a one-off event because OUS does not wish to simply proliferate committees. Now that the SIC has produced a report furnished with policy proposals, OUS has officially discontinued the committee.

The purpose of the report, Yaden said, is for OUS to advertise, and thereby capitalize on, Oregon’s reputation as one of the most sustainably minded states in the U.S. Indeed, OUS views sustainability as a competitive advantage for Oregon, one that figures into the long-term economic development of the state.

“We recognize that Oregon has a ‘green’ brand informally anyway, and our desire was to make it more explicit that each of our institutions in the university system…partakes of that and engages in it through both the breadth of the course offerings we have, the research that we do and community service,” Yaden said. “We think it helps our competitive position as universities and will help the state, ultimately.”

Jonathan Fink, the newly appointed vice president for research and strategic partnerships at PSU, said that OUS is concerned with sustainability because it is a “key focus for society, the economy and the environment.”

In addition, he said it is an especially relevant concern for students, “both in terms of their interests and in terms of the world where they will obtain jobs.”

OUS will continue to allow each university to pursue its own sustainability agenda rather than impose an agenda on them from above. Currently, the University of Oregon specializes in architecture and green chemistry, Oregon State in natural resource management and sustainable engineering and PSU in urban planning and urban ecology.

Because Oregonians “live the talk,” they give their state an enormous advantage at the university level, both for students and for professors interested in sustainability, Yaden said.

Yaden also referred to Oregon as a “living laboratory” in which people create livable, sustainable communities.

“We tend to take an integrated, a more holistic, view of everything,” Yaden said. “[But] we cannot rest on our laurels…We’ve got to keep working, and that’s part of what this [report] was about.” ?