Columbia aces academics, drops Sustainability 101

Not that anyone’s keeping track, but the influential U.S. News and World Report now ranks Columbia as the fourth-best American university, just behind Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. But U.S. News isn’t the only important college ranking, and Columbia’s academic prestige far surpasses its reputation for environmental sustainability.

The Princeton Review found that two-thirds of college applicants and their parents valued having “information about a college’s commitment to the environment,” with a quarter of that group saying that a school’s commitment to the environment is an area that “very much” influences their application decisions. Yet Columbia has nosedived in the Sustainable Endowments Institute’s College Sustainability Report Card ratings, dropping from first to last place within the Ivy League in a single year, and has earned an unexceptional 29th place in Sierra magazine’s “Coolest Schools” 2009 rankings. It has since severed all ties with the unfavorable raters, becoming the only Ivy League school to do so.

This decline relative to Columbia’s peers is not solely due to the imperfect “survey methodologies” decried in its “Open Letter to Sustainability Evaluating Organizations,” but to a slew of tragic, yet reparable ironies. Columbia’s Office of Environmental Stewardship is rich in talent but perilously understaffed and underfunded. The Earth Institute “is working to help the world pave a path toward sustainability,” yet the University lacks the will to pursue innovative sustainability measures. And though Columbia is affiliated with 70 members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is only belatedly implementing its own greenhouse gas emissions reduction plan.
The most fundamental problem is one of resources. The primary responsibility for the University’s environmental actions rests with the four full-time employees and occasional research fellow who comprise OES.

In their comparable offices of sustainability, not counting employees and students who would be members of other departments or clubs at Columbia, Stanford has 22 employees, Harvard has 15, and Yale and New York University each have five. Supporting those staff members, Yale has 20 student assistants, while Princeton and NYU both have five. Additionally, NYU has a sustainability task force of faculty, staff, and students with 60 members; Stanford’s similar working group has 45 members; and the University of Pennsylvania’s committee has 38 members. Columbia has no equivalent group. The OES team is not alone in its efforts to reduce the University’s environmental impact, but it does not enjoy the institutional support needed to hire a team of student assistants or share the labor with a standing committee.

Furthermore, Columbia seems unwilling to lead in sustainability efforts, let alone follow its peers. The University reveals its true priorities by systematically rejecting projects that narrowly fall short of paying for themselves. From cutting-edge LED tree lights for College Walk to large-scale composting for John Jay’s food waste, numerous sustainability initiatives have been shelved for introducing minor new expenses, apparently unconscionable sums to an administration that seems to be bound by an ethic of parsimony above sustainability.

For the last four years, Columbia has been in the Benchmark Division of the 600-college-strong Recyclemania competition, unable to join its Ivy League peers (minus Cornell) for want of a simple waste audit. Meanwhile, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have pioneered a revolving loan fund to invest in capital-intensive yet ultimately profitable efficiency upgrades. Princeton applies a voluntary carbon tax internally when conducting financial cost-benefit analyses. NYU purchases renewable energy credits to offset 100 percent of its electricity use with wind power.

Finally, climate change is the most significant sustainability issue of our time, but the University of Wally Broecker, James Hansen, and Jeffrey Sachs lags on practicing what it preaches. As we approach the second anniversary of a greenhouse gas reduction plan without a single report on its progress or implementation, Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and NYU enter their fourth through seventh years of documenting emissions reductions. More than half of the 332 colleges rated in the 2010 Report Card have signed the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, pledging to become carbon neutral eventually. Columbia has not.

While Columbia’s current solution to its embarrassing sustainability grade is to join a new rating system, no methodological change will alter the basic facts of this resource, leadership, and implementation crisis. We can either accept this mediocrity and disrepute or reform our ways and aspire to sustainability at the level expected of a top university.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in economics and political science with a concentration in sustainable development. He has had leadership roles in the Columbia EcoReps, GreenBorough House, and Green Umbrella.