As we look back over the past decade at the great deal of work that has supported the development and incorporation of the principles of sustainability into many of the institutions of civil society, including colleges and universities, several issues stand out.
First, there has been significant progress in accepting the usefulness of a loose definition of the term. This enables all stakeholders to create and use appropriate working definitions that fit a range of situations.
Second, we have done a great job of learning about the implications of sustainability at the individual level. We have involved ourselves in local government initiatives to reduce the damaging aspects of “footprint” in our neighborhoods, towns and cities. Many are thoughtful about reducing their personal environmental footprints and those of their families and households. Many individuals have taken successful leadership roles in the workplace, including at colleges and universities, around these issues and have been partially successful in institutionalizing concepts. Second Nature’s website contains over 250 stories or profiles that attest to the many college and university projects that have been completed to try to effect large and small scale change. And there are many other success stories from business enterprise and the corporate world.
Third, there are large scale projects attempting to make serious and accurate measurements of progress towards sustainability. There has been an explosive growth in ‘Sustainable City’ initiatives across the country – there are now over 200 of these projects currently in existence [1] – and all began with Alan AtKisson and Lee Hatcher in Seattle in 1990/91. Other significant indicator projects include, among many others, the work of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and the Global Reporting Initiative.
In this past decade we have seen a significant shift in public discourse towards the issues of sustainability, and even some of the more conservative major research universities are exploring how to respond and move forward. For example global climate disruption[2], human and animal disease epidemics, natural resource damage and depletion, and sprawl, among other issues, receive regular front-page coverage while simultaneously comprise an important part of the university research agenda.
However, we have not made much progress in institutional learning about sustainability, and not just in higher education institutions. A small number of corporations and businesses have made significant strategic shifts towards accounting for a “triple bottom line” and others are seriously exploring how to do this – but these are still a minute fraction of the whole sector. In this paper I suggest that there are some inherent issues in the organizational structure of colleges and universities that make it problematic for these institutions to undertake large scale changes in a short time period on their own. I will expand on four concepts that we at Second Nature have found promising in promoting organizational learning around innovations. The first concept involves recognition of the dynamically integrated campus around sustainability issues; the second is the need for the formation and support of communities of practice; the third is the need to explore the process of innovation diffusion and to make it a component of the discourse within and between the communities of practice; and the fourth is the adoption of innovation through best practice analyses and benchmarking.
In this paper, I have tried to capture something of the essence of these great institutions and I have tried to connect this to our aspiration for their potential future leadership role in society. The ideas outlined below are distilled from six years of institutional experience, gleaned from convening over 40 workshops with more than 1500 participants. Participants came from all segments of the 250 colleges and universities that were represented at these meetings. We have also drawn on the rich source of information provided by our stakeholders and audience that has accumulated on our website, to refine the workshops over time to reflect our own organizational learning on this issue.
As many of us know first-hand, slowness to change might almost be a defining feature of the modern college or university. Nonetheless, over the past 30 years higher education institutions helped create and have adopted, albeit slowly, a range of useful corporate management tools to their benefit. Some management techniques were tried and discarded without a trace (eg. Management by Objectives – MBO), others leave small traces (eg. Total Quality Management – TQM, Continuous Quality Improvement – CQI), and a few actually alter the landscape but not in ways that were expected (eg. Strategic Planning and Environmental Scanning). The latest wave includes Responsibility-Centered Management (RCM), Benchmarking and Pay-for-Performance. The influence of these last three is not yet known.
Many colleges and universities are attempting to honor their social contract to society, albeit within fairly narrow frames of reference. Often this is the result of student pressure – an example of this is the accelerated interest in service-learning. As a result the academy has become more aware and responsive to its major clients – the students – better at accounting for money, and more sophisticated at marketing [3]. Some of these changes are related to the long term stability – sustainability – of the organization but very narrowly focused on financial sustainability. If these are our greatest and most enduring institutions, how have they managed to survive?
Colleges and universities are among the oldest institutions in existence – about one millennium. In contrast, there are a handfull of corporations that have existed for two- to three-hundred years, and most other institutions have lifespans measured in years or at most decades. From the stakeholders point of view the stereotypic college or university consists of three types of organizations contained within one system: institution (academy), enterprise and agency[4]. Balderston describes this larger institution as ‘boundaryless’, given that the stakeholder profile can be general enough to include a large number of other civic and corporate institutions. Broadly speaking, the faculty and students generally view it as an institution, the trustees and some administrators consider it to be an enterprise, and governmental and, increasingly, corporate sponsors regard it as an agency. A deeper examination of the responsiveness to change in each of these components provides a hint of why colleges and universities have a powerful reputation for being slow to change. It shows that contradictory views exist among stakeholders of the capability of these organizations to embrace innovations of any type or even, with certain issues, to make decisions that are endorsed across the organization (Table 1).
Table 1. The responsiveness to innovation in three stakeholder components of higher education institutions.
| Component | Stakeholders | Drivers for change | Responsiveness to innovation | Reasons |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Institution (Academy) |
Faculty Students (Alumni) |
strongly discipline based. | Faculty – slower Students – quicker |
Debate and discuss less concern for institutional consequences |
| Agency | Government agencies Corporations | Rules and regulation | Variable – tend to be slow | used to a culture of inertia, have some suspicion of change as political fallout |
| Enterprise | Governing Board President Senior Administration |
most excited by economic and business models | Quick | responsiveness to market requires this |
Where did these entities originate? In the next section I have presented some historical detail for three reasons: 1) assistance with locating leverage points for change within the matrix of the organization; 2) the history provides clues about processes and mechanisms that would support or encourage transformation; and 3) to provide a larger context in which to consider future leadership by colleges and universities.
The academy is the oldest of the three components of the boundaryless organization described by Balderston. It also forms the basis of the original universities. In Europe the first universities were founded in the early 1300’s in Edinburgh, Bologna and Paris, although the idea of the Academy can be attributed to Plato[5]. Over the next two centuries (1300 – 1500) universities were established in other parts of Europe including Cambridge and Oxford. In the 1600’s Harvard (1636), Yale and Columbia were established modeled on the older European Institutions. Harvard, founded by Puritans and modeled after Oxford, had a distinctly religious intention in its mission. This pattern was repeated as the colonists spread westward in almost every major settlement. By the time the colonies joined to form a union (1776), there were nine colleges. Less than 100 years later at the time of the Civil War there were 250 colleges. The curriculum in these early schools centered on the study of Latin, Greek and religious philosophy (usually Christianity) with the later addition of other literature, some humanities and only much later the social and basics sciences. Humanities and languages formed the core of the liberal arts tradition for a bachelors degree.
In the period 1800 – 1900 research universities appeared and began to spread in Europe and the United States. In the first half of the 19th Century in Europe, there was an established tradition at the Royal Institution in England. The French Institutions of Higher Education and the German Research Universities were founded, together with other Science Centers in other parts of Europe. Germany became a clear international leader in chemistry, physics and agricultural sciences[6]. This excellent track record suggested that this was the best model to use in the US and it was duly adopted.
By the early nineteenth century in the US, there was an emerging sense that universities should be teaching more applied arts and mechanics. During this time there were many more proposals for funding to teach such things and to create departments to enable this. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) established in 1824, and even West Point, established in 1808, while largely military, had a strong emphasis on engineering of different kinds. Yale’s Science School was established, (WHEN?)but it was still a neglected aspect of the whole Yale institution. These applied sciences institutions were emerging, but at this early date were not very well established. In 1852, The University of Virginia became the nation’s first university, and eleven years later other states followed suite with the help of an act of congress.
In the United States in the latter part of the nineteenth century the shift from a religious-agricultural society to a largely secular-scientific and urban society was fundamentally transforming institutions of higher education. The role of science and technology in society had dramatically increased, a middle class had emerged, greater numbers of people saw education as the ticket to upward socioeconomic mobility, and new professions, largely secular, were emerging. The university had to start producing its own producers of “usable knowledge” as it geared itself to the upwardly mobile and productive society[7].
The Morrill or Land Grant Act of 1863 authorized the Federal Government to grant public lands to the States for the sole purpose of endowing state universities in an effort to assist the agricultural economy. This also ensured that a German-style research university was established in every state. The founding of Johns Hopkins marked the adoption of this new idea that included the allowing students to choose elective tracks, most notably concentrations in sciences. In 1871, Harvard President Charles Eliot added elective courses to the core college curriculum, hired faculty with particular specialties and transformed Harvard College into Harvard University[8].
By the mid 1890s, apart from the military-founded Rensselaer and West Point, there were 15 research universities, 10 of which were private (Harvard, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Cornell, Johns Hopkins and Stanford, and University of Chicago). The five state schools in existence at this time were Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin and California, and Virginia, which had not yet transformed into a research institution. All 15 institutions offered Bachelors degrees in humanities, arts, social and basic sciences and graduate degrees in the major professions. By the beginning of the 20th century the research university as we know it was fully established. Its graduate schools were modeled after the successful German research university model and the undergraduate education had a foundation in the liberal arts tradition.
The creation of the modern university coincided with the increasing role of science and technology in society, that, in turn began to displace earlier forms of higher education that were controlled by the religious authorities. The institutions came to embody the eighteenth century Enlightenment ideals that fundamental truths are knowable by reason alone, and that all persons must be given an opportunity to develop and display their rational powers. This marked the beginning of the democratization of education, which was until then a largely elite enterprise[9].
During this period there was an emerging emphasis on applied studies. In concert with this trend came the notion that state institutions should provide direct public services. This concept of the practical applicability of education was not confined to technology; social scientists, for example, began to take on prominent roles advising governments.
Coming from different backgrounds and established for different reasons, different Universities embodied different ideals, yet they all very soon took on the same internal organization and practices. Specialization, expertise and proficiency came to define all aspects of the academy, including the humanities. Professional associations marked off turf and monopolized particular concepts and methods, making communications across the disciplines increasingly problematic.
“Before 1890, there had been room for academic programs that differed markedly from one another. During the 1890’s, in a very real sense the American academic establishment lost its freedom. To succeed in building a major university, one now has to conform to the standard structural pattern in all basic respects…a competitive market for money, students, faculty, and the prestige dictated the avoidance of pronounced eccentricities.” [10] (p. 339-340)
From the Progressive Era on, there was growing support for the newly cast modern Universities, both from private philanthropy and from public funding. This was going beyond the piecemeal funding of earlier times. For example the 1890 Mill Tax gave Universities a fixed percentage of all mill tax that was collected. It became necessary to separate administration from teaching in order to accommodate the growth of these institutions.
The Industrial Revolution in America was marked by scientific enterprise taking on more of a prominent role. In addition the economic and demographic shift move from farm to factory, and the resulting industrial division of labor lead to occupational specialization. A middle class began to define itself with tracks of achievement, occupations, professions, and careers. “Members of this emerging class began to see their futures in terms of the tasks they would perform in the industrial economy rather than their reputations in their local towns.” (Edgerton[11], pg. 2) As the social economy began to shift, there was a growing sense of discontent with the traditional models of higher education. Increasingly, people were not receiving the kind of education that they needed for the practicalities of their lives and .
The establishment of the modern research university ensured that higher education became a center of innovation for the next 80 – 100 years. Crow[12] suggests that the evolution of US science and technology policy has been marked by three phases: a Laissez-Faire period (1790 – 1940), followed by the War and Post-war period (1940 -1950), and the Federalization Period (1950 -1975).
From 1790 – 1940 the government had no distinct science and technology policy or mission. The government did establish some key R & D labs to support weak industries (for example, mining ) but the key institutions in the national innovation system were the independent corporate R&D labs (for example, Du Pont). The newly established research universities served as the home of basic and advanced science training, with some support for research activity. Policy and research in this era was responsible for a long list on new innovations with wide positive impact on everyday life – including machine tools, sewing machines, hardware, agricultural implements, bicycles, electrification, and telegraphy and telephones title=””>[13].
During the war and post-war period (1940 – 1950), to support the war effort, the federal government established hundreds of new R&D institutions and an expanded role for academic science. By the mid-50’s the whole country seemed to be benefiting from this expanded role of universities; productivity was up, the tax base had increased. Then in the 1960’s the launching of Sputnik and the resulting damage to US techno-scientific pride, the emergence of the Civil Rights movement, and the baby boomers reaching college age all occurred at a time of unprecedented prosperity in the US. The resulting expansion of research, training, buildings and faculty took place with great enthusiasm and little attention to the quality of content.[14] At this same time, another wave of standardization swept over higher education with the professionalization of research. The ideals of the German Research Institution were coming to dominate the university.
It is also no coincidence that in the early 1900s the first large philanthropic foundations were established. In 1910 there were eighteen, of which the most influential were the Carnegie and Rockefeller. Both notably focused on the advancement of basic knowledge–chemistry and physics in particular. In the 1950s and 1960s foundations were ahead of all other private sources of support for higher education. Today foundations support comprises about 20 percent of all private support, or almost $4.0 billion, ranking third behind alumni and ‘friends’ who contribute a combined 54 percent, or about ten billion dollars[15].
Universities became dependent on the financial prosperity of the 1940-1970’s, so the economic crisis of the 70’s inevitably led to another surge in industry relations. By 1980 The Bayh-Dole Act was passed, giving universities the legal right to patent and license the results of federally funded research. This inspired an increased interest in technology across institutions of higher education. Interestingly, much of the work in this area has been in fields that were actually part of a move away from military related endeavors and toward ‘social issues’ as an answer to much of the student backlash in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Fields such as biology and chemistry took on a new charge as the medical sciences became a beneficiary of that shift. This trend has continued and expanded as the end of the millennium approached. In 1999 we see research university research supporting the growth of microelectronics, biotechnology, new materials, robotics, aircraft manufacturing, and advanced computer design[16].
In this brief history, I have tried to show that, although the institution of the university or college is old, there have been many wide-ranging changes and innovations within the system, and as such, within each individual institution. What are the implications of this for the adoption and incorporation of the concepts of sustainability?
Colleges and universities continue to enjoy a high degree of public support in the US. The public compact of support is vibrant and the sector is thriving. The more than four thousand Colleges and Universities have annual expenditures of $200 billion, equivalent to about 4% of gross domestic product. Tony Cortese, David Orr and others have made an eloquent case for these institutions to take the lead in trying to achieve a complete transformation in the way we think about our connection to each other and all the natural systems in our biosphere upon which we are completely dependent. We at Second Nature have identified four particular concepts that might assist with accomplishing this vast transformation:
Based on our experience helping colleges and universities adopt sustainability innovation, we characterize the campus as “an integrated Community”. With this systems view we focus on the existence of five major and interconnected components: faculty (teaching and research); operations and physical plant; students, community outreach; and administration. This view also fully acknowledges the existence of a complex list of stakeholders, with students as the primary clients. This forms a cornerstone of Second Nature’s philosophy on institutional change. It offers an exciting range of possibilities for a variety of change agents to work together to transform an institution. Tony Cortese has written extensive and detailed material on this topic[17]. I refer the reader to our website[18] for more depth on this idea. This concept not only requires changes in the sub-components or nodes of the institution but also the need for significant interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarly and day-to-day management activity.
The term wasfirst coined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger as a component of analyzing andunderstanding learning[19]. Lave and Wenger developed a complex of ideas around communities of practice in order to explain how humans learn from each other in a wider range of situations, of which the standard classroom is generally considered a narrow and special case. By drawing on observations of practice in some existing apprenticeship guilds among midwives, tailors, naval quartermasters, meat cutters and nondrinking alcoholics they were able to show some general principles operated that increased participation and knowledgeability within a group. The ideas contained in communities of practice serve as a supporting concept for Second Nature’s emphasis on development of a team approach to institutional transformation at all levels within any individual institution. For this reason teams participation is strongly encouraged at Second Nature workshops. In further support of the concept, Second Nature is currently developing resource guides that are tailored to apply to different campus stakeholders (currently for Faculty, Students, Administrators, but planning to expand this list in the future ). This facility will enable each to locate job-function relevant information more easily.
In this section I have made a distinction between adoption of innovation in colleges and universities, and the dynamics of innovation diffusion that would apply to any organization including institutions of higher education.On the other hand, based on an intensive analytical training, academics have an inherent skepticism of things originating in the world of commerce. This is not helped by any accompanying hype, the use of jargon, and a negative reaction to overly glib solutions to complex problems. In addition, in some instances a possibility exists that a rival at another college or university developed these ideas and now stands to reap significant finanacial rewards[21].Over the past 30 years higher education institutions have adopted a range of corporate management mechanisms to their benefit. As a result they have become more aware and responsive, better at accounting for money, and more sophisticated at marketing. For better or worse, they are more “businesslike’. Some imported techniques have also been successful and have become incorporated without much fanfare. An example of this is “program review” – initially tried and tested in federal agencies and now used in about two-thirds of all colleges and universities. It has been thoroughly adopted but its categories and guidelines reveal its true (distant) origins. Ewell suggests that fads remain fads because they don’t make the necessary cultural translation and/or because there is no particular problem for them to solve. Appropriate ideas will be readily and seemlessly employed if needed, with little opposition.Innovation diffusion theory offers some well-grounded theoretical ideas and very practical insights about harnessing and supporting the adoption of sustainability concepts[23]. Second Nature has successfully incorporated this into workshop content with very positive feedback from participants. Recognizing that each person plays a specific role in the process of innovation diffusion–from innovators and change agents, to mainstreamers and curmudgeons–provides us with a mechanism to develop a strategy for change. For an innovation to take hold, it must satisfy the “Gilman equation”: the perceivedvalue of the new way minus the perceived value of the old way must be greater than the perceived cost of making the switch. There are five factors which influence how quickly and thoroughly an idea is adopted: the idea’s relative advantage, complexity, trialability, observability and compatibility.
With increasing pressure from stakeholders, many colleges and universities are beginning to incorporate sustainability concepts into curriculum, campus operations, research and work with communities. Every individual campus is unique, but the processes at work on each one — along with the struggles and successes of administrators, faculty, staff and students — provide valuable lessons for those just beginning and for others already well on the way. Such lessons and case-studies highlight untapped resources and spark ideas for all involved in this ground-breaking work. This process is supported by the implicit connections within each community of practice. As mentioned above, Second Nature’s website contains over 250 stories of sustainability innovation at colleges and universities and there are many others that have been documented elsewhere.
Benchmarking and best practice (henceforth ‘best practice’), while unfamiliar to higher education management as a term, has nevertheless been widely used as a process by colleges and universities, most extensively by the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), based in Houston, Texas[26]. Comparison with peer institutions has driven enrollments, funding, recognition, and prestige. Further more, faculty are comfortable with a culture of information sharing through a range of venues, meetings, publications, and more recently the internet.
Best practices appeared in corporations in the early 1990s in companies such as Xerox, Eastman Kodak, and DuPont. These companies claim to have achieved a range of measurable benefits including reduced cycle time, improved customer service, lower costs and improved overall product quality. They have fully integrated benchmarking into strategy, structure and culture and it is usually one of several tools being used.
Benchmarking is more than simply comparing oneself to a statistical standard. Working and learning systematically, first, it is necessary to understand internal work procedures, then to search externally for “best practices” in other organizations. These then have to be adapted to make them workable internally.
In cooperation with a number of other organizations and institutions, APQC has refined a methodology that is simple in concept and complex in execution. They emphasize that the more important information lies in the processes behind the benchmarks, and that adaptation and use of these actually lead to improved performance.
The type of benchmarking (or knowledge-sharing) that is going on in higher education is different from the process in corporations. In higher education comparisons are made among “peers institutions” more in a style of friendly rivalry. True benchmarking encourages comparisons and exchanges outside of the circle of peers to look at quite different types of organizations. Examples are Southwest Airlines mechanics talking to the pit crew of an Indy 500 race car team, the staff of a hospital emergency room talking to Domino’s Pizza about taking relevant customer information quickly over the telephone. Outside pressures and new paradigms are going to strongly encourage colleges and universities to move away from talking solely to “insiders”.
As we have listened to our audience from our workshops, partnerships, business and industry, healthcare and government and on our website, we have heard consistently repeated requests for information and resources and have integrated these into our concept of best practices. These requests include:
Best practices offered a concept that we can use to introduce sustainability content combined with process into the mainstream of any college or university. Based on Second Nature’s experience with its stakeholders we can already highlight some significant lessons from the incorporation of best practice into our regional workshop concept:
As sustainability innovation is incorporated into the rapidly changing world of higher education, there will be shifts over time about what constitutes a best practice. We fully expect that our framework will need to be expanded and refined to keep pace with this evolution. The content and the focus of the workshops will also shift as our collective understanding changes.
The New Jersey Higher Education Partnership for Sustainability (NJHEPS), and Emory University.
I have chosen to highlight these two examples for the following reasons:
Details on each will be provided in my presentation.
“Universities are our greatest and most enduring social insititutions.” [27] (p.1) They may also be a prototype of the postindustrial organization, most similar to the e-commerce organizations that have sprouted up in the past few years. This is because they live on and for creation, dissemination, and application of knowledge. The university or college…. “at its best offers an interesting and sensitive balance between individuality and collective interdependence; between felt commitment and formal authority; between creativity and production; and even between the frivolous and the serious, the sacred and profane. Other organizations if they are to advance the human condition, may in the future have to become more like universities than the other way around” [28] (p. 5).
But universities have to take much greater responsibility for the state of our planet. The earth’s biosphere is in an increasing state of disequilibrium that is threatening the viability of natural systems. This disequilibrium is either directly or indirectly a function of human agency, and largely a function of a deeply flawed relationship between humans and their natural habitat. We continue to educate generation after generation of students as if there were no environmental crisis. Environmental ignorance is increasing as the population expands, and gaining environmental understanding must be an essential goal of every student’s education.[29] Therefore, using the goal of sustainability as the organizing principle of education is a crucial step in addressing ecological imbalance and repairing the human relationship with the natural world and the relationship that humans have with each other.