Higher Learning Adapts To a Greening Attitude

"Colleges are realizing that achieving sustainability is one of the defining challenges of this century," said Julian Dautremont-Smith, a member of the association. "They want to be on the right side of it."

The biggest driver, he said, is student demand. The Princeton Review, which started rating colleges' sustainability this year, did a survey asking prospective students what they want from their school. Two-thirds said they would value a commitment to the environment, and nearly a quarter said it would strongly influence their choice.

At U-Va., where students helped design a barge that will travel the Chesapeake Bay and that they hope will teach children about ecology, architecture dean Karen Van Lengen said environmentalism "is not a course at our school. It's a way of thinking. . . . It's a mind-set."

The topic can be found across the academic spectrum, often popping up in unexpected places, including fashion design, medicine and law. At Goucher College in Baltimore, all students are required to take an environmental sustainability course. GWU is launching an institute to study solar energy, and a panel has proposed making sustainability a core value for the university.

At the University of Oregon, students pushed the school to add a minor in environmental studies. "The University of Oregon is gah-gah over sustainability and environmental issues," a spokesman wrote in an e-mail, adding that over the past decade, the number of seats in classes that touch on such issues has more than doubled.

Schools have added graduate programs or adapted them and increased research. At Johns Hopkins University, students in a part-time master's degree program for working engineers kept asking for more courses on alternative energy, Prof. Allan Bjerkaas said.

The Harvard Environmental Economics Program is tapping students and professors from numerous subject areas for research issues such as climate change.

The University of Maryland at Baltimore's environmental nursing program has included a push to remove mercury thermometers from hospitals.

A scientist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, which offers a doctorate in environmental studies, mapped out an analysis of human impact on the world's ecosystems.

At the College Park campus, students are taught to think about the long-term effects of growth. In development, it's typically "pinch your pennies and get out of there," said Robert Tjaden, who just graduated and plans to develop homes.

After seeing much of the farmland in his Delaware home town turn into cookie-cutter homes far from jobs, and studying wetlands, storm water management and the cleanup of sites, he wants to build neighborhoods with more trees and more shared open space, rather than big, private lawns full of grass. "There are many alternatives to just wiping the slate clean and plopping the houses down," he said.

Students asked for "greener" courses in architecture at Catholic, Ott said, with topics such as computer modeling programs that calculate how much energy buildings use under different climatic conditions. "The student interest then led to a faculty interest," he said. Among the resulting changes are a master's degree in sustainable design and a master's in city and regional planning that emphasizes avoiding sprawl, long commutes and so on.

He said he expects more in the future: "It's going to become critical, in my view, to the whole evolution of architecture."