Brown received high marks — and tied with two other schools for a first-place ranking — from an institute dedicated to advancing sustainability for its efforts to be a green campus.
The Sustainable Endowments Institute released the fifth edition of its College Sustainablility Report Card last month. According to the institute's website, the report card is an evaluation of the sustainability efforts in colleges and universities across the United States and Canada. The grading system revolves around nine different categories such as student involvement, climate change and energy, and investment priorities.
In the report, Brown received an "A" in each of nine categories. Dickinson College and the University of Minnesota also received perfect scores.
The report card's assessment was made using surveys sent out by the institute to 52 committees on Brown's campus, according to Chris Powell, Brown's director of sustainable energy and environmental initiatives.
The University has shown a steady increase in its scores since the report card's inception. In 2007, the first year the report card was released, Brown received an overall grade of "B," according to the institute's website. The increase in the University's sustainability GPA in recent years has to do with the change in criteria from the surveys, Powell said. Recently, the institute has given more credit to schools which have made actual progress with their environmental initiatives than to schools whose sustainable programs have not improved, he added.
Powell also credited both the University's reduction goals and funds allocated to the goals for the high marks. "The more people that do that, the more the market is influenced, because the market responds," Powell said.
Powell praised the increase in student involvement with climate and environmental issues on campus. Organizations are "much more organized and involved," Powell said.
EmPower, one of Brown's environmental groups, was one of the groups contacted by the institute, according to Ari Rubenstein '11, executive director of emPower. The group's many projects dedicated to increasing sustainability on campus were discussed in the surveys sent to the institute, Rubenstein said.
Though the high grades are a sign of forward progress, Rubenstein said he knows that there is still room for improvement.
"Sustainability is about a mindset more than anything else," Rubenstein said. "Being an environmentalist does not have to mean being a tree-hugging hippie."
Powell agreed, saying that it is one thing to make investments, but another to get people to adapt and do things differently.
"Do I think we're perfect? No. We should always be assessing what we're doing now," Powell said.
