Higher Education and Green Jobs

Sometimes it's lonely on campus, being a planner. Start planning now to attend higher education's premier planning conference for 2010, SCUP–45, July 10–14 in Minneapolis, where you can network and converse with more than 1,000 of your peers and colleagues.

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What happens when "creative clutter" meets transparency in a new, elegant building? Robert Campbell reviews the new MIT Media Lab building at MIT.

Frank Moss, the Media Lab’s director, puts it this way: “It will take time to regain the sense of mess and to repopulate with junk.’’

It’s the classic marriage of form and content. The new building is Snow White and the Media Lab is Mad Max. Time will reveal how well the marriage works.

That said, viewed simply and purely as a work of architecture, this is a wonderful building. You can think of it as an exercise in transparency. The Media Lab has long been famous for hiding itself in a building by I.M. Pei that was a nearly windowless box. The new building, which joins the Pei at one edge, is exactly the opposite. From outside, you can look all the way through it from one end to the other. It’s sheathed in shimmering glass and metal screens that allow about half the sunlight through to the interior. You feel that the building is temptingly veiled, not blanketed.

We recently spent some time with Xarissa Holdaway who is, among other things, the editor for the Campus Ecology Project's ClimateEDU: News for the Green Campus. ClimateEDU is the most readable of the two must-read regular electronic publications devoted to campus sustainability issues. The relationship between SCUP and the Campus Ecology Project (which is a unit of the National Wildlife Federation - NWF) go back to the mid-1990s when its director, Julian Keniry, published Ecodemia, and presented on it at SCUP-31 in Washington, DC. The president of NWF's board of directors, Jerome Ringo, is a plenary speaker for SCUP-45 in Minneapolis next July!

This particular issue of ClimateEDU is themed around "green jobs" and includes articles about how community colleges are adjusting their curricula to be sensitive to the needs of green-minded employers, how that demand varies from region to region and state to state, a specific look at those issues in the hard-hit Midwest, and the "Pathways Out of Poverty" that green jobs initiatives at community colleges create for disadvantaged or impoverished students who cannot afford a four-year education.