Colleges Should Plan—and Teach—for an Oil-Scarce World

A nice piece from Scott Carlson of The Chronicle of Higher Education. (He'll also be at SCUP-43 in Montreal next week!) Yes, it's not just the current high price, it's the likelihood that the price will stay high, or if it does go down, will go high again: And then there's the likelihood of growing scarcity of oil at any price. Maybe not a concern for personal use of an automobile, but something colleges and universities need to address in their planning for as short a time frame as 10-25 years:

College leaders, with help from facilities managers, sustainability directors, faculty members, and even students, should think hard about how systems on their campus would operate in an energy-scarce world. That thinking should range beyond running part of the campus fleet on a cafeteria's fryer oil, a seemingly-popular response at the moment. Look at food supply chains, for example, and how far food travels from field to dining hall (1,500 diesel-powered miles, on average). How do you heat and cool buildings, and is that new building in the campus master plan really necessary? (It's regrettable that this energy crisis comes at the end of a campus building boom.) Is your campus an integrated part of the community around it—friendly to pedestrians and affordable to students and staff members? Or is it a destination at the end of a long freeway drive?

Brett Pasinella, a program coordinator at the University of New Hampshire's sustainability office in Durham, is thinking about some of these very issues with his colleagues. "You quickly run into problems and questions that go far beyond the standard internal university thinking and more into how the university fits into its region and its community," he says. "You run into the same problems that a town planner would run into."

The most important question colleges should ask themselves: If students are getting squeezed by high energy prices, what will compel them to pay your tuition?