This just came across my desktop. Thought it was worth sharing.

I woke up this morning to hear the end of a seemingly pleasant tete-a-tete between Mark Zandi (of Moody's Economy) and Robert Reich (currently at Berkeley). The statement that stuck in my mind came from the mouth of Zandi; he said "I don't think there's any other issue that policymakers face that is as difficult as the current housing foreclosure crisis."

Ummm ... wrong.

The foreclosure crisis, while difficult to solve, is a piece of cake compared to the global climate disruption crisis. Foreclosure causes are known and relatively transparent, the players involved all want the thing solved, the only questions remaining are what the best course of action is and who's going to get rich along the way. (Sure, all the press is about how people are going broke. But it's just not possible to throw around hundreds of billions of dollars without creating some real wealth in the process. General Electric has figured that out. I'm sure others have, as well.)

But GE is at least up front about what it's doing. They lobbied for the money fair and square, and they're going to keep it. The corporate players on the climate disruption front aren't nearly so honest about their roles; they're more interested in maintaining plausible deniability.

As if trying to understand the [I'm sorry, I'm at a loss for an adjective -- "labyrinthine" doesn't begin to cover it] complexities of the climate system so that we can estimate sensitivities and identify points of leverage weren't hard enough, scientists have to address climate disruption in a social milieu that's not only full of disinformation, it's full of disinformation about the disinformation (meta-disinformation?). ExxonMobil has been funding originators and purveyors of climatological falsehoods for over a decade. In recent years, it's claimed to have stopped. That claim is a lie. Who says so? Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute of the London School of Economics. A couple of years back, when he was at the Royal Society, Ward was fundamental in outing ExxonMobil's disinformation tactics and causing them to become one step more subtle in their approach.

See, there are difficult problems and potentially insoluble problems. Enemy action, whether it's physical interference or information warfare, is an attempt to turn the former into the latter.

It's just dawned on me that we shouldn't be talking about "accountability" in the educational system. The current connotation of "accountability" is that somewhere there's a responsibility to identifiable individuals, and that's the wrong way to look at any particular system of delivering education. Educational system quality is certainly a topic for attention, but "accountability" isn't a useful construct.

Think about other complex systems on which our society depends. Do we talk about the lack of "accountability" in our transportation infrastructure? In medical care? In military operations (defensive or offensive)?

For some reason, when we're talking about education it's acceptable to get all invested in the idea that no child will get left behind, and then to really expect that to happen. Why is NCLB any less ridiculous a slogan than "no car stuck in traffic" or "no patient dies except from age-induced total organ failure" or "no deaths of innocent civilians or from friendly fire"? In each of those cases, a certain number of suboptimal outcomes are expected, because they're seen as unavoidable.

Part of the difference, I think, is based in how we conceive the benefits derived from each system. When the primary benefit is seen as being of a public nature, a certain amount of individual inconvenience (up to and including death) is deemed acceptable. Military operations are seen as providing a purely public good (preservation of liberty or society) so, while many serious mistakes are made, individual accountability (certainly at the command level) is deemphasized. The transportation system provides a mainly public good in facilitating the conduct of commercial and social activities; drivers might grumble about summer construction season or mis-timed traffic controls, but we don't hold anyone accountable. And medical care is seen as having a significant public benefit, even if each individual service is rendered to an individual patient; the entire medical malpractice insurance field is designed (and operates, in my state) to protect doctors from accountability.

But somehow, in recent decades, education beyond middle school has come to be treated as if the benefit it delivers were almost entirely private. High schools brag about their graduates that go on to college, and private high schools sell themselves largely on the basis of getting their kids into more colleges, better colleges. Universities emphasize academic programs that maximize starting salaries, and business schools (for example) are ranked in part on the starting salaries actually achieved. Articles are written about how a Masters is the new BA, just as 25 years ago a BA was the new high school diploma -- the minimum credential you needed to get a "decent" job. But the only unit of measurement of any importance is the dollar, and the dollars being discussed are those to be earned by graduates after schooling.

Part of the reason for the emphasis on private benefit is that, as any economist will tell you, to the extent that a portion of the benefit derived goes to the public, the efficient way to pay for that portion is with public funds. A lot (not all) of the folks who emphasize "accountability" for educational systems also seem disposed to the idea that public funding should pay for as little as possible; an exclusive emphasis on private benefit thus coincides with their preferences and prejudices. Unfortunately, once the common vocabulary gets shaped and promulgated, getting back to truly open-minded discussion is an uphill battle.

As the comments on my last post imply, a truly open-minded discussion is what we need. The US system of universal education was created for the benefit of society, not of individuals. More informed citizens, better employees, increased economic development, higher morals, lower crime -- all of these were arguments in favor of educating all the kids, not just the rich ones. And those objectives are still important, even if no one seems to focus on evaluating how well they're being achieved. The fact that a highly educated member of Congress can seriously accuse the notoriously diverse and rambunctious scientific community of successful conspiracy to perpetrate a worldwide hoax over a period of decades and not get laughed out of DC says that we not only don't focus on them, we don't really expect their achievement.

So, we need an open dialogue. And as part of that, the leading voices in higher ed need to be clear about how society benefits from what we do (even when we do it imperfectly). Higher ed -- especially the private colleges and universities -- needs to take a leadership position on this, since so much of the rest of the education system consists of public employees who may have difficulty making statements on politically sensitive topics.

We need to complement society's understanding of the private benefits we create with an appreciation of the public benefit that also results. The criteria by which the quality we achieve can best be analyzed must address both. Much benefit (public as well as private) can be quantified, though certainly not all. But the way to measure public benefit can't be through standardized testing in 4th, 8th and 12th grades; it has to involve key characteristics of the society we and our graduates create and maintain. We need to be more careful about what we measure, because that's what we're likely to get more of.

(And yes, I'd hope that a commitment to sustainable behavior at all levels of society would be one of those key characteristics. Sustainability is certainly a good, and it's not achievable at an individual level.)

"Accountability" is one of those lightning-rod words in the educational community. Far too often, it means teaching only those things (easily memorized) that can readily be tested. After all, if you can't measure educational success, how can you know that you're achieving it?

The logic of the common demand for accountability is, of course, as flawed as it is superficially attractive. "You can't manage what you can't measure" is a maxim commonly (but incorrectly) attributed to W. Edwards Deming. Somehow, nobody thinks to combine that with the military axiom that "resources you can manage, people you have to lead." Since the main product of education is embedded in people, what makes anyone think that a simplistic application of "management" is appropriate? Despotic regimes might reasonably demand education systems which produce easily "managed" citizens, but how is that appropriate for a representative democracy?

Which is not to say that an education system can't and shouldn't be held accountable, if only by itself. And, on those terms, I'm not exactly proud of how the US system has performed in the past few decades.

Exhibit A is the recent debate on the floor of Congress over Waxman-Markey. If the purpose of liberal education is to create critical thinkers, informed citizens, responsible leaders, literate discussion or knowledgeable voters, it's pretty obvious that we've failed. Not because of the wording of the bill, or the proportion of votes for or against, or the fact that some oppose it from the left while many oppose it from the right. Our failure is evident in the level of the rhetoric used in opposition, much of which reminds me of things heard on an elementary school playground. And much of which gives no evidence of rationality.

If that statement sounds a bit extreme, it doesn't go nearly as far as does Paul Krugman's op-ed piece yesterday. Krugman understandably accuses the most rabid cap-and-trade opponents of betraying all of us. Indeed, betraying the planet. Check it out, it's worth the read.

My own personal reaction, though, is on a somewhat smaller scale. I can't help wondering what percentage of the least erudite, least rational opponents of GHG legislation are graduates of the US education system. And what percentage of the voters who put them there.

If higher ed is, as a sector of society, going to lead the way towards anything resembling sustainability, we've got some explaining to do. And some reforming.

And that doesn't mean more standardized tests.

The 2008 AASHE Digest came out last week. It's a compendium of short blurbs describing sustainability-related activities and achievements at AASHE members colleges and universities. As I mentioned when the 2007 book came out, it's a yearbook rather than an encyclopedia. As a result, it gives only a snapshot of a process which is constantly changing, but it's a pretty large snapshot. "Panorama" might be a better term.

I haven't had a chance to go through the whole thing (it's 357 pages long), but I took a look at the table of contents which divides the entries into categories (education and research, operations, administration and finance, stuff like that). Given that the length of each blurb is fairly standard, the number of pages in each section is a good first-order indicator of where the action is.

It's in operations. And, to a lesser degree, in administration; but a lot of the administrative activity is hiring of sustainability folks to concentrate on operations, so there you go.

Items about the way buildings are operated fill more pages than all the mentions of new curriculum, new research, or co-curricular activities. And that's just basic building operations, not including things like carbon accounting, climate planning, dining facilities, renewable energy, grounds maintenance, purchasing, waste management or transportation. Just keeping the lights on and the insides warm and dry.

Maybe it's the fact that building operations (think energy conservation) is where the low-hanging fruit mostly are. Or maybe (although I somehow doubt it) building managers are better at tooting their own horns than academics are. But I think that part of the problem is that schools haven't done a good enough job at helping teachers infuse sustainability perspectives into the curriculum.

That's a shame.

In fact, of the whole 357 pages, only two (realistically, more like 1.3) talk about what schools have done in terms of sustainability-related development of faculty and staff. And, of that 1.3 pages, less than half relates to faculty in their role as teachers. The most common approach to encouraging and enabling faculty to instill sustainability into the curriculum is some combination of workshops and stipends.

Workshops (often 2 or 3 days long, most commonly during the summer) share ideas, hints, success stories about how a sustainability perspective can be injected into pretty much any subject matter. After all, if your subject is biology or environmental studies, how to teach sustainability is pretty obvious. If you're in engineering, architecture or resource economics it's only slightly harder. But teaching sustainability in the business school has to be done comprehensively, or it could be seen as promoting greenwashing. And do you teach sustainability in humanities courses? If so, how?

Stipends are offered on the theory that faculty respond to financial incentives -- sometimes, pretty small financial incentives. If you're going to revise a syllabus or two over the summer anyway, and the university will throw a few bucks your way if you work a sustainability-related theme in there ... why not?

Given the reputation of faculty members as independent-minded, mandates aren't the way to go. So, the obvious question is what else schools should be doing. Is there something about the way courses get developed and taught which, subtly or otherwise, discourages the inclusion of sustainability-related perspectives? Is there some incentive (short of reduced teaching load -- let's stay realistic here!) that would induce you to work more sustainability issues, cases, considerations, theories into your classroom? Or, to consider the other possibility, are you already doing that and the school's just not reporting it to AASHE (so far as you know)?

OK, I can admit when I'm wrong. I shouldn't have used the term "social class" to refer to various strata of folks on campus. While sociologists may disagree about how many social classes exist or what the criteria for differentiating among them are or how stable a particular class hierarchy might be, they pretty much agree on the definition of class. That definition includes (in the words of William Domhoff), "patterned ways of organizing the lives of its members from infancy to old age that create a relatively unique style of life, and ... mechanisms for socializing both the younger generation and new adult members." On that basis, my hierarchy of physical manipulators, symbol manipulators, faculty and "hats" breaks down into physical manipulators vs. a single class of symbol manipulators in various forms. And I may have been unclear, but I never meant to imply that entire classes existed within the campus community, only that the campus community intersected various classes.

As a former farm kid, I incorrectly analogized the hierarchy of social classes to the traditional hierarchy of farming classes -- gentleman farmer, yeoman farmer, tenant farmer and hired hand. The gentry owned land which was farmed by someone else, from whom they collected "rents" in the traditional meaning of that term. Yeoman farmers worked their own land, while tenant farmers occupied and worked land they didn't own, paying someone else rents in cash or kind. (American tenant farmers include sharecroppers, who invest all the labor for a half, or sometimes as little as a third, of the crop yield). Over time, the hierarchy based on land ownership broadened into a hierarchy determined by ownership of more generalized "productive property" which, as we now experience it, is capital. Thinking along the lines of ownership (or at least control) of the productive capital of the university led me to my original conclusion. "Hats" became the gentry, faculty the yeomen, and the rest of us tenants of various kinds.

Oddly enough, the one true class rift that intersects campus cuts straight across this "tenant" category. Physical manipulators are, as a rule, members of a so-called lower/lower-middle class. Whether they're unskilled laborers or skilled tradesfolk, they grew up with working-class values and attitudes (that "infancy to old age" thing), and they see the world through working-class eyes. I've heard my boss speak of some employees on campus as having a "union attitude", but it's not based in union membership -- it'sbased in a relationship to employment and employers which understandably often leads to union membership. Symbolic manipulators, while still tenants, see life in terms more consistent with the perspectives of faculty members and above. Their socio-economic status may be low (often, lower than that of skilled tradespeople), but their objectives are more abstract.

It's this differentiation -- the beginnings of an understanding of the differences between physical manipulator and symbol manipulator perspectives -- that primarily informed my previous thinking. (That and, as I mentioned earlier, the remembrance of images of a lifestyle only deans, executives and occupants of endowed chairs can hope for.)

But the experience has been instructive. Whether I think of them as a class or a group or a random collection of individuals who happened to make similar choices, I've been reminded of the sensitivities of faculty members (and not just at Greenback). I'll tread more carefully (if not necessarily more lightly) in future.

... history. Don't know much biology. Don't know much about science books. Don't know much about the French I took.

Friend WTF suggests I leave sociology to the sociologists. Would only that I could. In the same comment, he agrees that sociologists aren't much interested in the subject of class, because the dominant paradigm says that we live in a classless society. Of course, the only folks I've ever known who really believe that are the ones who grew up in privileged circumstances, kind of like the way the only folks who really believe race doesn't matter in the USA are ones who grew up white.

See, dominant paradigms are like that. The way they maintain their dominance is by organizing what we all do, and what we all know without even thinking about it, in their own terms. They take on an air of inevitability, like the way things are is the way they should be -- the only way they could have turned out -- the best of all possible worlds. That's why folks don't typically refer to "the dominant paradigm", or even "the paradigm". To even mention its existence is to suggest that alternatives are possible, which is to question the inevitability of how things are now. To be a trouble-maker.

As a campus administrator, I've run into this within the systems of campus administration. Administrative departments, of all stripes, get formed in order to solve problems organizations -- operating in terms of the dominant paradigm -- believe they have.

For example, accounting departments and accounting systems are set up to keep track of money, because money makes the world go 'round -- with money, all things are possible. But our accounting (and, when we're doing that accounting in the future tense, our budgeting) systems end up doing more than keeping track of our money. They end up having a major effect on how we use our money -- what we do with our money -- what we can do with our money -- what we can do at all.

The classic case is one that's well known among facilities administrators and sustainability advocates: the split between capital and operating funds. The low-hanging fruit among projects which will make any campus more sustainable consists of the ones which address energy efficiency. Spending a little more (often a truly trivial amount more) in the construction or renovation of a building can create tremendous operating savings down the road. But many campuses can't realize those savings, because construction is paid for out of capital funding streams, while building operation is paid for in (and hence any savings are realized within) annual operating budgets. The capital/operating split is an important one for campus management, because it recognizes the importance of paying for this year's expenses out of this year's income, while also allowing long-term investment (and long-term borrowing) to create assets like buildings with long useful lives. Nobody chose to differentiate capital from operating funds in order to encourage building design and construction decisions which promote energy inefficiency, but that's what's happened for years. Decades. Pretty much ever since the end of World War II.

For all those years, construction and campus planning departments have been rewarded -- and have rewarded their employees -- for getting the most building(s) out of the fewest capital dollars. The people in charge of building at Greenback aren't bad folks, and it's not that they don't appreciate that investing a nickel now can return a dollar down the road. But their performance gets measured on whether or not the nickel of capital gets spent, not on whether the dollar of operating savings gets accrued. It's their nickel, but it's someone else's dollar. Because that's the way the accounting/budgeting system works -- the (seemingly) only way it can work -- the way we've found to get answers to the questions that running a campus within the logical frame of the dominant paradigm causes us to ask.

Now, to be fully truthful, I should acknowledge that the capital/operating chasm isn't as wide as it once was. The planning folks at Greenback are starting to look more at life-cycle costs -- at the impacts capital decisions can have on operating expenditures -- and they're tweaking their designs in the direction of energy efficiency. But the battle's far from won -- the old paradigm is still dominant, it's just no longer omnipotent. Designs for buildings on our campus still look a lot like what was being built a couple of decades back; energy efficiency improvements are just that -- improvements tacked on after the basic skeleton of the building has already been laid down -- not features which figure into the basic nature and concept of what we determine to create. The question that's being asked isn't "how can we create the most efficient building within the capital funding constraints which exist?", it's "how can we make marginal improvements to the kind of structure we're most used to creating (based on long-ingrained habits of capital cost minimization) in order that it not be grossly energy inefficient?".

The other thing that's important to realize is that the reason even the "marginal improvement" question is being asked at all is because a relatively few folks, working through organizations like AIA, NACUBO, SCUP, and ACPA under the influence of the radicals at the Rocky Mountain Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, the ACUPCC and others (both lists are grossly incomplete -- my apologies to the dozens of hard-working individuals and outfits I've left out) have been asking questions which conventional thinking has a hard time answering. See, a dollar is (in the final analysis) still a dollar, the ratio between the capitalized portion of life-cycle building costs and the operating portion has been shifting towards operations for years, and at the highest levels of university administration all the different expenditures and all the inconvenient decisions tend to come together in one place and time.

But if leverage exerted at the top of a complex organization like Greenback can accomplish (only) marginal change, what's required to make profound change possible? What will it take to start asking questions like "how can we create the most efficient campus we can afford"? or -- even more important -- "how can we create the most efficient university we can imagine?" Shaping questions which will (with luck) influence the thinking of high-level campus decision-makers (who got to where they are by succeeding within the rule structure created and required by the dominant paradigm) isn't likely to move us that far. To move Greenback towards real sustainability, we need to find a point of greater leverage. We need to change not just the questions our systems get asked, but the vocabulary they get expressed in. We need to change the culture by which the campus operates.

One of the hopes for higher education's ability to lead the move towards sustainability is that -- as a microcosm -- campus culture might be more easily shifted than can the culture of Western Civilization as a whole. Not that it's easy by any means, just that it's not totally impossible. And if campus culture shifts, that shift will filter out into society in general -- both because it will demonstrate another (perhaps even more successful) way of doing business and because it will become inherent in the decision-makers of future society who (after all) are our primary product. But cultural shifts (on campus as elsewhere) don't start at the top. People at the top are too invested, intellectually if not emotionally, in the current way of doing things. It's not that they don't want to think outside the box, it's that -- more often than not -- they don't see the box any more than a fish sees the water. If you're really comfortable in the box, you don't see it, in part because you don't really want to see it. The people most likely to be able to see the box are the ones who feel constrained by it (think sustainability advocates) and -- perhaps -- the ones who are cramped by it.

Most campus administrators I've spoken to at Greenback feel cramped by the way the place runs. They see the gross inefficiencies in energy utilization for heat, for lighting, for transportation, for lots of uses. But they feel powerless to change anything. They've been told for years that change is practically (if not theoretically) impossible. And, since real change almost never happens (and happens only slowly even in those rare instances), they've come to believe it's true. As a phenomenon, it's not limited to campuses -- I've seen it in every industry I've ever worked in or with. Lower-level employees learn early on not to make waves, so they accommodate themselves to the size and shape of the boat they're in so that -- if and when they ever advance to a level where they could significantly influence that size and shape -- change becomes difficult to conceive, much less consider.

Years ago, my dame gave me a coffee mug. On it was written, "If we all work together, we can totally subvert the system." (I love my dame -- she was a troublemaker before me and is a far fiercer competitor than I'll ever be. But that's another story.) What she didn't fully appreciate was that if we all work together, we don't so much subvert the system, we become the system. Subversion is based on seeing the system in its own terms, so that you can interfere with it. Subversion, alone, doesn't get you to where you need to be.

(Which relates to why I have an affection for WTF's moniker. I got my son a t-shirt with that question printed on it, which he wore it fairly regularly to high school after cleverly subverting initial teacher disapproval.)

And that gets me back to why I can't leave sociology to the sociologists. I need to understand how people at all levels experience the university. If I'm going to subvert the systems and structures which deliver the message that change is impossible, I've got to understand how those systems and structures operate and why they have the effects they do. Given the range of folks who work on campus, that requires me to understand better something (one among many) which I've thought of in the past as social class. To the extent that my attempts to understand its operation yield up a model which is useful in the design of effective subversions, I don't really care what label we use. (One of the characteristics of folks at my level of university society is that we would never think of possible misuse of an abstract term as creating a "trainwreck". Like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, we try to find words which will express what we're trying to say, not thoughts that fit into the ostensibly authoritative and approved vocabulary.) Call it "class", call it "stratum", call it "aardvark"; I don't really care. What I do care about is loosening some of the bonds that keep Greenback operating the way it always has, so that change becomes possible, so that sustainability becomes possible. And ...

What a wonderful world [that] would be.

The series title "Town & Country" put me in mind of something I hadn't thought about for years.

When I was barely able to peer over the meadhall windowsill, I stumbled across a magazine at the local public library. At first, I thought it was imported from the UK, because it didn't occur to me that people with that much money and that many polo ponies could live in the USA. It was, of course, "Town & Country". It was published by Hearst. And it was all about class. About people who exuded class. And about making readers who didn't exude class wish that they were reading something else. Which, after browsing a couple of issues, I did.

(BTW, there's a magazine -- still published by Hearst -- called "Town & Country" on the news-stands right now. It may be a direct lineal descendant, but it's by no means the original. Aimed at upper-middle-class professionals who wish they came from old money, it bears as much resemblance to the journal of my youth as does the current t-shirt shop -- nary a custom-made safari jacket or a Purdey shotgun in sight -- to the original Abercrombie & Fitch.)

Anyways, back to that class thing.

Here in the USA, we're not supposed to think much about socio-politico-economic class. We like to think that our society is classless, at least in the sense that where you're born on the spectrum doesn't have to be where you end up. "Classlessness" is tied into our idea of ourselves as a meritocracy; empirical data that folks in historically classed societies exhibit far greater socio-economic mobility is conveniently ignored.

But if there's a single portion of American society where social class is plain to see, it's got to be higher education. Universities in particular. Greenback is a good (?) example.

At a quick count, there are five social classes on campus. In rough order from bottom to top, four are:

- The physical manipulators. Folks whose jobs involve moving actual stuff, or overseeing such movement. I'm thinking building maintenance, grounds maintenance, the parking crew, campus security.

- The symbol manipulators. Business administrators, academic administrative support staff (the workers, not the hats), IT staff. Folks who do mostly indoor work, with no heavy lifting. (If your IT staff occasionally gets involved in pulling network cables behind walls or above ceilings, they're still mainly involved in symbol manipulation. The full-time electricians who do the same job, however, are physicalists.)

- The faculty. I'm sure there are subclasses within this one (tenured vs. not, endowed vs. not, graduate vs. under-grad, etc.), but as a whole the faculty seems to interact among itself by a different set of rules than it interacts with any of the other classes, with the possible exception of ...

- The "hats". Deans. Some (but not all) Directors. Anybody with an executive title. The people who significantly influence expenditure levels, employment levels, and pretty much anything else that comes along.

The fifth class of people on campus is hard to put into the same continuum as the other four. Sometimes it's like they're at the top of the heap, sometimes the bottom. (In the minds of some of the employees, students are at the top of the scale. The lived experience of many students, though, might contradict that view.)

My observation here at Greenback is that each of these classes tends to converse, eat, socialize, behave not only separately from each of the others, but by a different set of rules from each of the others. What's expected, what's acceptable, what's valued differs from class to class.

And the implication of that, from a campus change agency perspective, is that each class of campus contributor has to be considered individually. The values and priorities of a faculty member and an academic administrative staff member aren't the same, even though they might work in the same department -- sometimes even the same office. They'll likely respond best to differing presentations of different information. The bars our sustainability discussions have to get over before any behavior will change aren't just higher or lower based on job function and role, they're different in kind. The definition of what "doing a good job" means, the risks associated with not doing a good job, the willingness (or lack thereof) to change how a job gets done -- each of these has an answer which depends, at least in part, on the class of campus community member whose job we're talking about.

I'd ask my friendly neighborhood Sociology professor for guidance, but it seems that sociologists (as a rule) are less interested in the subject of class than they used to be. Maybe that ties in -- at least tangentially -- to the evolution of clothing stores. And magazines.

Exceptional, at least, in the sense that it goes against the grain of most of what I've been thinking on the subject.

Most of my musing on the town/country split is a reaction (understandably, I hope) to what has been going on in North America for the past half-century or so. Urbs and suburbs sprawling out into what was once good agricultural land, creating offices, abodes and elbow-room where once the buffalo (or at least the white-tail and cotton-tail) roamed. Like a good, yeasty bread dough that's doubled or tripled in size, my hope is that we can punch it down, put it into a traditionally-sized loaf pan, and create something with a satisfying density and a tasty crust.

But there's another pattern of change possible, rare but hardly unheard of. It means putting some seeds and berries into that dough, but who doesn't like seeds and berries?

Urban agriculture.

It's the principle of "eat local" taken to its logical conclusion for folks in cities. A hundred years ago (and again during WW II), it was the rule even if for the past 60 years it's been the exception. I saw a documentary a while back in which it described how the people of Havana (a fairly densely populated city) were able to raise about 30% of their fruits and vegetables within the city limits. (And their diet contains a lot of fruits and vegetables.)

Urban agriculture is starting to catch on here in the USA, and the education community is a key player. In Detroit, an initiative has gathered support from Wayne State U, AVI Foodsystems (WSU's dining vendor), Ford Motor Co., the city, and a bunch of non-profits. An article from YES! magazine describes how schools (at all levels) are helping students form a healthier relationship with food (often involving at least an awareness of local/urban farming); a bunch of teachers has put together a "sustainable table" multimedia curriculum for the elementary grades. University students and recent graduates are showing a renewed interest in agriculture (the average American farmer is currently almost as old as the dirt he works), perhaps based on the idea that they can bring culture and agriculture into geographic proximity, if they do it right.

As I said before, none of this (minor technical improvements aside) is particularly new. The historic record is clear. In 1864, ten acres was enough. By 1922, liberty could be achieved with only three acres, although in 1935 (perhaps due to the Depression) independence apparently required two acres more.

A number of smaller colleges (Bowdoin, Oberlin, others) have established campus gardens or food co-ops which communicate to all their students (even those with absolutely no interest in sustainability or agriculture) that urban farming is a reality, perhaps an expectation. Of course, what would really drive the message home would be for a school to convert all or part of its campus quad into a vegetable garden. Not that that could ever happen (?).

So if cities need to get citier and the country needs to get countrier, what does that mean for campuses? Do we need to get more universal? More collegiate? More collegial?

Looking at campuses as communities, we need to get more communal. Not all of us, but many. That’s the bad news, if you perceive your current campus environment to be absolutely perfect and any change, as a result, to be for the worse. In general, though, the changes campuses need to make should improve life for students, for faculty and (especially) for staff.

The main change for full-time students should be an increase of housing that’s either on campus or within walking distance. Students who live on or near campus produce no commuting emissions. They can be influenced towards healthy and sustainable menu choices (not totally, I’m sure, but more than if they live in scattered sites miles from school) through various meal plans and dining co-ops. They can constitute a critical mass which can affect (perhaps even for the better) the local culture, reinforcing each others’ expectations and modeling to the rest of the surrounding city/county/state. In a sense, students living on or right near campus can – as infrastructure evolves – experience many of the benefits of co-housing while reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.

For part-time students, the only obvious way to reduce emissions is to provide instruction where the student already is, rather than forcing students to drive to campus. At Greenback, one of the things our GHG inventory pointed out was the impact part-time students have on commuting emissions – there was a clear, strong correlation as our part-time enrollment went up and down. This makes sense, as full-time students will generally locate near campus (if they can), while part-time students often have an established residential location which was chosen based on a raft of factors, often not including educational plans. So an increase in distance/online education or regionally distributed classroom space may be the way to go, depending on how many part-time students a school has, how many shared courses they typically take, and rural/suburban/metro area dynamics.

For faculty, the main change is probably more situational. I’ve known some colleges which own houses that they rent to faculty at below-market rates. In the past, this has often been to (partially) offset low salaries paid to instructors and assistant professors, but there’s no reason the practice couldn’t be extended. Or the school could subsidize (or otherwise encourage) faculty housing purchases within walking distance of campus. Advantages to the university include reduced demand for campus parking, easier faculty access in inclement weather (not that we ever get that in Backboro, you understand), a new income stream (rental housing can be fairly profitable, especially with a large-scale operation and long-term tenants), and even a local community less likely to complain to the politicos when students (predictably) malfunction in public. Advantages to faculty can include lower costs of living (perhaps even elimination of need for one of the family cars), better interaction with other faculty who are now neighbors, and a healthier lifestyle (daily walking as opposed to driving).

Probably the biggest impact, though, would be for staff – academic staff and, even more so, facilities/administrative staff. At Greenback, staff tend to live farther from campus than do faculty. A lot of that’s due to the fact that staff get paid less, and for decades a main method of choosing residential location has been to keep moving outward until you can afford the monthly mortgage. But many staff work hours other than 9-to-5 and (for a variety of reasons) tend to hold their jobs for decades. The result? An employee base which commutes in single-occupant vehicles (car-pooling is difficult), for long distances, five days a week (as opposed to 3 or 4 for most faculty), for years and years. Oh, and staff are more likely to drive older vehicles and/or pickup trucks. More gasoline. More emissions.

There are a couple of ways to address staff commuting. One is, as with faculty, to find a way to incent them to live near campus. The other is, particularly in towns/areas with few transportation choices, to provide practicable commuting choices other than the single-occupant vehicle. Vanpooling and park-and-ride systems work well for factory shiftworkers (or did, when factory shiftwork was common) – similar approaches could be adapted to the realities of working on campus.

A big implication of “town & country” thinking, then, is the need for colleges and universities to engage in transportation demand management based on the widest possible set of perceptions, paradigms and possible solutions. For residential campuses, this might mean getting more residential – bringing students and employees closer together. For non-residential campuses (commuter colleges and many community colleges), it might require getting more community-based – taking the instruction closer to where the student already is by whatever means necessary.

One exception to all the above, of course, is experiential learning. I’m thinking agriculture or oceanography here, but the model also applies to internships with businesses or governments or anthropologists. Reducing transportation demand in these cases probably requires doing them intensively and exclusively for a period of time, rather than mixing morning classes on campus with afternoon internships across town, Monday through Friday. Since part-time students create high commuting emissions, one thought is to avoid transforming full-time students into (behaviorally) part-timers as much as possible.

Reshaping the way the Greenback U. community lives and learns will, of course, affect the way the campus interacts with/experiences the Backboro area. But if we manage it, and explain why we’re doing it, the very act of reshaping provides a community outreach opportunity. And happier/healthier employees. And a more focused student experience. And – down the road – possibly even more loyal alumni.