Columbia may be getting at least one A in sustainability this year.
The University signed on as a member of the Sustainability, Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System, a new way to measure universities’ efforts at “going green.”
Nilda Mesa, who was named Columbia’s first director of environmental stewardship in 2009, said that the system accounts for critical contextual differences between universities—meaning a large urban university like Columbia will not be evaluated on the same scale as a small rural college.
“Colleges and universities have vastly different ways of defining and responding to sustainability,” Mesa said. “In part, this is based on geographically where they are, but also on the mission of a higher-ed institution. So, for example, if you’re a small liberal arts college, you don’t have very many lab facilities, and your greenhouse gas emissions are going to be different than if you’re a large university where research is important.”
By measuring institutions this way, the system seeks to emphasize cooperation between schools to reach sustainability goals instead of encouraging schools to compete and scramble for the best rating, she said.
As the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education website bluntly puts it, “STARS provides only positive recognition; there are no bad grades.”
This year, Columbia received a B rating from an outside group, the Sustainable Endowments Institute, which issues its College Sustainability Report Cards every year. Columbia had touted its A-minus grade from 2009 but criticized the 2010 grade as the product of a flawed measuring system.
“It’s reasonable to say that this is a response to the report card. No university wants to get bad ratings on sustainability, especially when it’s a major university like ours,” Elliot Sclar, director of the Center for Sustainable Urban Development at the Earth Institute, said. “So, I do think that they’re constantly trying to do things to work better and look better.”
Mesa insisted that the decision to join STARS “was not a direct result” of the fallout over the Sustainable Endowments Institute grades. To criticisms that the system is too lenient, she said, “Find me a better tool with as much substance and transparency and with such a list of distinguished participants and partners and we’ll use it.”
STARS became operational just this year, and although only two institutions have undergone STARS evaluations so far, the system already has over 200 members, including major universities like Stanford and Yale.
Because STARS is new and its transparency has yet to be determined, Sclar noted, “Nobody’s exactly sure how the system is going to work.”
But Mesa said that the University is ready to move forward. “We don’t really have any idea how we’re going to do. … This is a new process for all involved, and through experience we might find that some things aren’t ideal,” she said.
“In the sense of showing where we’re going and how we’re improving, STARS seemed like the best option,” Mesa said.
Barnard has not joined STARS, and it did not complete the surveys for the College Sustainability Report Cards in years past, leading to a grade of D-plus.
Barnard did join Columbia in July in signing a letter from a coalition of colleges and universities to a group of sustainability ranking organizations asking for “consistent and comparable metrics,” including the Sustainable Endowments Institute.
According to Lisa Gamsu, vice president of administration and capital planning at Barnard, STARS’s strength is that it seems to provide “resources for benchmarking and self-assessment within one’s own group,” making it more indicative of a school’s sustainability efforts than current systems
Gamsu called the fact that the information-submitting process is “time-consuming” the main reason that Barnard has not yet joined Columbia under STARS.
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