An "A" For Sustainability

Kudos to Harvard University, Dartmouth University, the University of Washington, Middlebury College, Carleton College and the University of Vermont! All of these institutions received an overall "A" grade on the newly released College Sustainability Report Card 2008.

The report card is published by the Cambridge, Mass.-based Sustainable Endowments Institute. It focuses, cleverly enough, on the 200 public and private universities with the largest endowments. The schools were graded in five categories: administration, climate change and energy, food and recycling, green building and transportation. Interestingly, the schools scored their highest grades for food and recycling, with 29% earning an "A" in that category. The report found that 70% of the schools buy food from local farms and that 64% serve fair trade coffee.

You can view the full report card--including the four schools that got overall failing grades--here.

Gift Funds ES Chair At Dartmouth

Environmental studies is beginning to attract the big money. The latest example is at Dartmouth University, which has just revealed a $2.5 million alumni gift to endow a professorship in the field. The inaugural holder of the Richard and Jane Pearl Professorship in Environmental Studies will be Andrew Friedland, the current chair of Dartmouth's Environmental Studies Program.

According to Dartmouth, Friedland's research focuses on the effect of atmospheric pollutants on high-elevation forests, as well as on how our individual energy choices affects the environment. Friedland, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, has been on Dartmouth's faculty since 1987. He is also a co-founder of Dartmouth's graduate program in Earth, Ecosystem, and Ecological Sciences.

Dartmouth currently offers undergraduate majors in environmental studies and environmental earth sciences. It also offers both master's and Ph.D degrees in earth sciences.