Aug. 9, 2005

Going Green

De Anza College dedicates a solar-powered parking facility in July.

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When college administrators gathered in Washington last month to discuss facilities and planning, environmental issues were a hot topic. But the news that officials heard at the annual meeting of the Society for College and University Planning was decidedly mixed.

Lots of colleges are interested in how their policies might affect the environment. But research that looked at the records of a number of Boston-area colleges found that many colleges are scared off of doing more — fearing that going green will hurt their bottom lines. The analysis of 11 Boston-area colleges found that — on all of their campuses — only six buildings had been certified as environmentally friendly.

In Silicon Valley, across the country from Boston, Martha J. Kanter can’t help but compare her community college district’s performance (rather favorably) with the performance of colleges in the birthplace of American higher education. The Foothill-De Anza Community College District, of which Kanter is chancellor, will by the end of this year have three buildings certified as green, and has undertaken numerous other projects that demonstrate that environmental issues need not conflict with budget issues.

“There’s a deep, philosophical commitment here to improving the environment,” says Kanter. She credits professors with pushing the issue, and board members with getting on board. While Foothill-De Anza has been improving its environmental policies, environmental studies programs have also flourished, with enrollments growing and new degree programs being added.

Several other community college districts recently came to Foothill-De Anza for briefings on the philosophy there, so college officials hope that their approach may spread statewide in the country’s largest community college system.

Many of the campus buildings that have received the most attention for environmentally friendly designs, like one at Oberlin College, are focused on environmental studies. Similarly, one of the green buildings at De Anza College is also for environmental studies. (Buildings nationally can receive certification as green from the U.S. Green Building Council.)

But the others are a science facility and a student center. “There’s a message there in saying that we are all responsible for conservation, not just those who work in environmental studies,” Kanter says.

While Foothill College, the other college in the district, has not gone for green building certification, it has done other things to promote environmental quality. For instance, two buildings currently under construction that are nestled in hills will have “green roofs,” with dirt, grass, and landscaping — preserving green space and also cutting down on insulation costs.

Buildings — because of their visibility — capture much of the attention in discussions of environmental policies. But John Schulze, executive director of facilities and operations at Foothill-De Anza, says that less visible issues may matter just as much.

Schulze’s division has overseen a series of energy audits and improvements that have saved the district millions of dollars, starting in the late 1990s. Many of the improvements were financed through Chevron Energy Solutions, which offers colleges deals in which the improvements can be financed through projected savings later, making it possible for colleges to make energy-related investments even if they don’t have a lot of cash on hand.

Between 1991 and 1996, Schulze said, electricity use in the district rose from 1.4 million kilowatt hours a month to 1.8 million. Following all of the energy audits — which led to replacing chillers, boilers, lights and more — the figure was back down to 1.4 million by 2003. The cuts in energy usage are more impressive because the district had grown by about 200,000 square feet of facilities during that time (to a total of 1.5 million square feet).

Schulze says that the only way campuses can continue to achieve savings (of energy and money) is if they don’t stop at one project, but make such efforts ongoing. At Foothill-De Anza, the latest such project was finished in July: the installation of cogeneration facilities (which use the sun to generate power) at both campuses, including new parking facilities with solar-generated energy. With additional improvements that have been made on air conditioning and other energy-related matters, the district projects that it will cut electricity purchases by 46 percent.

From an environmental perspective, that will amount to a savings of 14 million pounds a year of carbon dioxide emissions — so that these savings will have the same impact as if the college planted 2,000 acres of trees.

Schulze and other college officials stress that they are not bankrupting the college to achieve the savings — and in fact are seeing the opposite happen. While the improvements cost more than $3 million, cuts in utility spending are expected to exceed $800,000 annually, so the college will be doing well financially from the project in just a few years.

At the same time Foothill-De Anza is saving resources, it is adding to its environmental course offerings. De Anza, for example, currently offers three environmental associate degrees: biodiversity, pollution prevention and environmental law, and energy management and climate policy.

This fall, the college will introduce a fourth degree program — in environmental stewardship, and based on student response, De Anza expects 50 students a year to be graduating with that degree once the program is up and running. The emphasis will be on case studies (many of them real cases that are currently facing local communities) on how to respond to environmental problems or conflicts. Coursework will mix environmental science with policy courses.

Julie Phillips, chair of environmental studies, sees the new degree as great preparation for students who will transfer to four-year institutions and seek jobs in government and nonprofit groups, as well as with companies dealing with the environment. Based on the track record of the existing degree programs, she also expects many students to find jobs with their associate degrees alone.

“Stewardship is something you can attach to any other degree — in environmental studies, business, journalism, computer science,” she says.

Phillips says it is important that the administration “gets” environmental policy. “This needs to be a team approach,” she says. “We’re trying to practice the very thing we are teaching — stewardship.”

Recently, Phillips was involved with a workshop Foothill-De Anza gave for eight other community college districts in California, and she was thrilled with the level of interest. “We need this to spread.”

— Scott Jaschik

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