More than 180 students, faculty and staff expressed interest in serving on a university-wide sustainability committee. Many of these faculty, staff and students attended an informational meeting in late March 2016. The committee currently includes 20 representatives from across the campus community; they have volunteered to serve as the “committed core” for the proposed committee.
The committee is currently conducting a Sustainability Audit, which includes specific benchmarks and targets to help guide future, sustainable decision-making on campus. We will use nationally recognized categories, which are used by hundreds of other institutions of higher education in the country, specifically we will use the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s STARS system (To see how other schools use these benchmarks, see https://stars.aashe.org/institutions/participants-and-reports/). The four major categories include: Academics, Engagement, Operations, Planning and Administration.