The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
College recognized for sustainability
Oberlin College is being recognized for its sustainability initiatives.
The college received a STARS (Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System) gold rating from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, according to a news release.
Bridget Flynn is a sustainability manager for the college’s office of environmental sustainability. She said the STARS program is a tool used to assess sustainability in higher education.
She said the program assesses the schools on all facets of sustainability, including the classes
offered, the way the school is run and how employees are treated.
“All of those kinds of things,” she said. “(It’s) more than just if you are using fertilizer and what is your electricity grid. Sustainability to us is an almost entirely different movement that’s connected to environmentalism, but sustainability really aims to incorporate people.”
According to Flynn, the college previously received a gold rating in 2012 and at that time there was only one school which had achieved the highest rating of platinum. This time around three schools achieved platinum.
“Hopefully next time we’ll be striving for platinum, but I think gold is reflective of where we’re at and progress that we’ve made and also recognizing that there is still a lot that we can do,” she said. “We’ve used it for quite a few different things.”
While Flynn and her 150 collaborators who contributed to the report were putting it together, she said they were also brainstorming on ways they can become even more sustainable in the future.
The information gathered for the STARS report is also used to compile the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education annual Campus Sustainability Index.
The index recognizes institutions based on 17 aspects of sustainability. The 2017 report ranks Oberlin as sixth in the baccalaureate category.
Flynn said the students of Oberlin College are interested in classes that contain some kind of sustainability component.
“We labeled courses in the course catalog that relate to sustainability,” she said. “We had started to find sustainability-related courses in the catalog and put it on our website. We realize later, when we were doing analytics, that it was one of our most highly trafficked pages.
“Students really wanted to find these courses.”