Campus athletics and sustainability

AASHE has released the results of a survey of sustainability practices within top-division collegiate athletics departments. It's interesting reading.

As everyone in higher ed knows, athletics has a special role to play in shaping the public's impression of what goes on on campuses. So whether the athletics department is behaving sustainably is arguably more important in the overall scheme of things than whether some random academic department is doing so. (And no, I'm not saying that athletics is more important than academics. Far from it.)

In a nutshell, the survey indicates that collegiate athletics operations are well behind both campuses as a whole and professional sports organizations in sustainability of operations. But what struck me hardest in the advance information about the survey results is that almost 80 percent of respondents didn't know whether their institution had signed the ACUPCC, even though almost three out of four said that sustainability was a "high" or "very high" priority at their school.

Filling out surveys is a task that any athletic director is likely to delegate -- perhaps to an administrative assistant, perhaps to a student intern. And (if Greenback is any example) folks in athletics pay attention to the rest of the institution kind of the way most of us pay attention to our autonomic nervous systems. But still ...

If 80% of people in any given category on campus can be unaware whether their school has committed to accomplish something profound, what's the likelihood that it's going to happen? What does it say about the efforts central administration has put into sharing information about any commitment that's been made? What does it say about effective leadership on our campuses?

Even if everyone at a particular campus knows about, supports, pulls together to achieve carbon neutrality, it's still going to be a real challenge to accomplish. In the face of an 80% ignorance level, the difficult becomes totally impossible.