Ratings game: The Princeton Review

The Princeton Review included us in their list of the nation's "greenest colleges." This is a short list of only 18, so this is fairly significant recognition, and quietly satisfying.

When I first arrived here in 2000, we weren't anywhere near this good. The college had a good reputation for natural resource programs, and we had done a few green things, like serendipitously grab the Jimmy Carter solar panels from that GSA warehouse and put them on our cafeteria roof, or like the time we had an early-days ESCO in to switch out light bulbs and fit watt-hour meters to lighting, to try to save some energy there. We'd also just begun to build properly insulated buildings.

We hadn't done very much else. We were burning oil left, right and center, and we didn't buy green power, or properly recycle. We grew very little food on campus, and we bought hardly any local food.

But, as it turns out, the most important thing there possibly could be to do, we had already done.

A year earlier, in 1999, we had instituted a required course in sustainability for all students. In my opinion, that one single action probably did more than any other to set us on a path towards becoming ever more sustainable, every year.

Why?

Because then we had to begin to walk our talk, or students would complain.

Every year since then, a hundred or more Unity College students have received an in-depth training in sustainability, including material on climate change, food, and energy. This occurs even if they are studying a major that they feel is unrelated to sustainability. And it occurs even if they are themselves uninterested in the subject.

And every year since then, of course, the best of these students have asked "OK, if this is so important, what is the college doing about this?"

So I credit students for much of this success.

One memorable event stands out: Our former business manager threatened to switch our food service over to a multinational contractor. Students rebelled, in what I called tongue-in-cheek the "Sodexho Riot" although it was nothing of the sort, and a rather disheveled but effective protest movement ensued. A rally attracted over 100 students. the administration of the day backed down right smartly, and the food service remained in house, and now, many years later, does a roaring trade in local and home-grown food and contributes to our green ratings.

In another, students interested in the college getting renewable electricity organized the "Solar Power Dance Party." They had made a small solar power station with a single panel and a couple golf-cart batteries and inverter. It all fitted on a small hand truck, and could be wheeled from place to place. They set it up in the parking lot outside the Activities Building, and blared out music all day, annoying the heck out of the teachers trying to teach in the nearby classrooms. But they made their point.

I'm not sure exactly how much this event had to do with the college's purchase that year of 100% renewable electricity. But the two did happen in sequence.

Later, again at students' request, the solar panel was matched with another and fitted to one of our small cottage-style four-bed dorms, along with a proper inverter and a small wind turbine. This dorm became the "Eco-Cottage." Students competed to live there so they could live at least partly off-grid (the so-called Eco-Cottage still had oil heat and a mains refrigerator and stove).

But was the Eco-Cottage the idealistic prototype for the Unity House? And the newest plans for a truly super-efficient small dorm?

I think we'd have to agree it was.

So, dear readers, when you study the Princeton Review or other green college rating systems, or when you hear the claims of one or another college or university to be green, I would ask a couple of hard questions, if I were you:

Do they actually teach what they say they believe, and to all their students, not just the environmental majors?

And do they walk their talk?

If they do the first, the second follows naturally.