Universities for Cities and Regions: Lessons From the OECD Reviews

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) does a lot of interesting research, often focused narrowly on Europe. For example, with regard to higher education and local and regional development, it has found that:

Regions can, with the help of their colleges and universities, play a key role not only in the development of national but also local and regional innovation systems. But much more needs to be done to take full advantage of higher education in regional and city development. It is becoming clear, for instance, that imitation and adaptation are no longer sufficient strategies in this kind of work. Unique advantages have to be constructed, and they have to be built on innovation. Universities and colleges can and should play a proactive role in providing the ideas and strategies to fuel that innovation.

According to this report from Barbara Ischinger and Jaana Puukka, in Change magazine, the OECD Reviews that led to that understanding are being repeated in many more countries, including two parts of the United States. This is probably something to be watching for more information about.

Universities Reach Out to Potential Students Across Houston Area

A local focus on a national trend:

"Higher education is moving to where the students are, with satellite centers and branch campuses popping up all across traffic-clogged metropolitan areas. . . . Four area universities will join Prairie View A&M University in northwest Houston next spring, ending an ongoing turf battle over who will serve the fast-growing affluent area."

Read on:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6512628.html

NCEF's 'School Facilities Planning and Design Guidelines - State and Local'

The National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities publishes a wide-ranging series of annotated references and links to useful resources. The annotations are collected in dozens (or more) sets of topically linked domains. Although the NCEF has a mandate to cover K–12 facilities, it also has a number of sets of resources relating specifically to higher education. This partifular resource is for both, and quite useful: "NCEF's resource list of links, books, and journal articles with examples of guidelines and regulations published by states, counties, and municipalities regarding school facility planning, design, and maintenance."

Food and Sustainability: From the Macro View to the Micro View

The morning plenary session on Tuesday at AASHE was about food. In addition to this blog post, you can listen to a podcast interview with Shiva here and read Scott Carlson's take on the same session here.

In the space of an hour, Vandana Shiva, physicist and agricultural activist, managed to connect the oil and human labor inputs required by modern agriculture, the nutritional deficit of monocrops, the dangers of species loss, the moisture depletion of agro-chemically treated fields, the imbalance of grain that goes to factory farms rather than human mouths, obesity and diabetes, US grain subsidies, biofuels, the 160,000 annual suicides of Indian farmers who are finding the monocrop seeds they purchased won't grow, and the mass exodus of families from heritage land. The coherent case that emerged at the end was simple: "We must get people back on the land."

One of several sustainable food experts that have earned attention in recent years, Shiva is in good company. Michael Pollan, Frances Moore Lappe, and even Jane Goodall have spent years studying the American industrial food systems and come to similar conclusions. . . .

She went on to say that universities and colleges, who made major strides in the research that based our current agricultural system on fossil-fuel based fertilizers, have a large share of the responsibility for finding a solution."Campuses have a lot of eaters, and a lot of influence in their community. Wouldn't it be exciting if biology classes planted their own biodiversity plots? Why shouldn't edible schoolyards be on every campus?"