Climate.edu: Ep3 -Building a Network of Sustainable Colleges & 
Universities
with AAASHE's Julian Dautremont

Episode Transcript

[Theme Music]

HOST: Welcome to climate.edu. 

Climate change is a systemic problem, possibly the mother of all systemic problems, 
and requires an unprecedented level of global coordination. cooperation, and 
partnership between different sectors, within sectors, and in some ways, some specific 
ways, higher education, at least in the U.S., which I know the most about, does this 
really well. You know, think about the dissemination of research or coordinating 
workforce needs with state and local governments. But outside of a few examples, 
higher education... Education really isn't adept at this at all. Maybe that's because it's 
not one thing. There are different types of institutions, community colleges, four years, 
research ones, public, private. They all have varying missions, funding streams, student 
populations, accreditation bodies. Even publicly funded institutions within a state 
compete. or a dwindling supply of students. This can often disincentivize meaningful 
collaboration. 

Since the early aughts, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher 
Education, or AAASHE, has been helping higher education institutions not only think 
about climate change and sustainability in regard to their own campuses, but also has 
been connecting and coordinating these. individual campus efforts across its global 
network of 900 colleges and universities. Established in 2005, AAASHE's goal is to 
"inspire and catalyze higher education to lead the global sustainability transformation." It 
does this by offering professional learning, mentorship programs, conferences and 
events, other sustainability-related services. to faculty, administrators, staff, and 
students who are trying to drive sustainability innovation on the campuses of AASHE 
member institutions. My guest today is AAASHE's Director of Programs, Julian 
Dautremont, a long-time leader in the higher education sustainability community and 
one of AAASHE's co-founders. In his work with AAASHE, Julian has helped lead the 
creation of the Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System, STARS, 
something we discuss, as well as the American College and University President's 
Climate Commitment. Julian and I discussed the history of AAASHE, some of the work 
the organization is helping facilitate among its global network of colleges, and how 
exactly higher education is doing in leading the global sustainability transformation. 
Besides his work with AAASHE, Julian served for two years as the Chief Sustainability 
Officer of Alfred State College and spent another year as Senior Program Manager with 
Greener U. Julian has an MBA and an MS in Natural Resources and the Environment 
from the University of Michigan and a BA in Environmental Studies from Lewis and 
Clark College. 
So, without further ado, here is my conversation with Julien Dautremont. 

HOST: Julien Dautremont, welcome to climate.edu. 

JULIEN DAUTREMONT(JD): Thanks for having me. 

HOST: So I want to talk a little bit about your role as the director of programs at... kind 
of what you're responsible for there. But you're also a co-founder of the organization, 
and so you have a long, long history with it. Can you tell us, for folks who may not have 
heard of AASHE before, what do you guys do? What is the mission of the organization, 
and what's the history? over the organization because it's you know it's you're not a 
recent organization been around for a while so if you tell us a little bit about AAASHE 
and what it does.

JD:Sure yeah, so I'll start with the acronym if folks aren't familiar so a she it's the 
Association for the advancement of sustainability in higher education and as the name 
implies we are an association of colleges and universities working towards sustainability 
and our role, our functional role is to help our members achieve their sustainability 
goals, right? We help members learn from one another basically. 

HOST: So, you are a membership organization? 

JD: Yes, yes. We are a membership-based association. So, institutions. members, not 
individuals, it's like a whole college or university to become a member, and our mission 
is to inspire and catalyze higher education to lead the global sustainability 
transformation, and we achieve that by doing the kind of things you would expect an 
association to do to facilitate that learning across across your membership. We do a big 
annual conference. We do webinars, workshops, courses. We have a large online 
repository with thousands of resources on all aspects of higher education sustainability. 
We have a mentorship program. We have a newsletter that highlights all the cool things 
that are going on in higher ed. We do publications and our flagship program is 
something called STARS, the Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System, 
and I'm sure we'll be talking about that later, but certainly at a high level, it's a tool that 
campuses can use to measure and report on their sustainability performance. So 
anyway, that's the kind of the big picture of who we are in terms of the history and how 
we got here 

HOST: Yeah, and you know, just let me you know You know this pod. I mean the 
reason for this podcast is is a journey for me right and understanding Feeling a little 
forlorn about you know, what the sector where my career has been been in higher ed, 
what I felt was a lack of a response to climate change as I've become more interested, 
and so as I was digging deeper into what is happening, how are higher ed institutions 
responding, I came across these several organizations. including AAASHE, Second 
Nature is another one, really that are focused on a more national, even international 
scale at that institutional transformation, which for me was very encouraging. But it 
seems like those two organizations at least kind of came from the same idea. You want 
to talk a little bit about that in the history? 

JD: Yeah, well, so we were actually an early program of Second Nature. So Second 
Nature predates AAASHE by about a decade or so. They were founded in the early 
'90s, and 10 years or so into their work, they started getting some grants to set up 
regional networks. That was a model. upon it as something necessary to try to advance 
higher education sustainability. So they started a network in New Jersey that still exists 
and we grew out of a network that Second Nature started in the western United States 
and Canada. So we had our first meeting in 2002 at University of Canada. California, 
Santa Barbara, and I just pulled together a number of folks that Second Nature knew on 
the West Coast that were working on higher education sustainability and formed this 
pretty loose network, but it held a few conferences and started to gain some kind of 
traction as an entity.By 2006, we started doing services to try to attract members. The 
grant that Second Nature had to support the founding of this network ran out. We 
needed some- 

HOST: What was the grant?

JD: It was from the Compton foundation. I don't know how much it was for to be totally 
honest. It wasn't really part of it. I just knew that's what was -- that's what got -- we were 
called the education for sustainability western network at the time. EFS west. That's 
what got it going. But we needed some more stable sort of income to be able to do that. 
So, I think that's what got it going. to keep a network going if it was going to be anything 
more than like just a mailing list, right? If it was going to have staff and do things, it 
needed some kind of income stream, and so we settled upon membership as the 
strategy and institutional membership in particular as opposed to individual membership 
largely just because the time it takes to recruit a institutional member is not dissimilar to 
the time it takes to recruit an individual member and typically an institution will pay more 
and it led to or if it felt appropriate given our focus on whole campus transformation right 
we weren't really interested in just working with one particular stakeholder group in 
higher ed we wanted to transform the institution as a whole so Anyway, we went with 
institutional membership, and in order to justify that, started doing these different 
programs and services that would benefit members, and a lot of those made sense at a 
national scale, so by 2006, we decided to become a national association, change our 
name, and as part of that become sort of legally distinct from Second Nature. which at 
that time had sort of shifted its focus to just climate specifically as their main issue, and 
that's the pattern that exists today is where HE is sort of the big tent, sustainability and 
higher ed organization with climate as a key focus but not the only focus where a 
Second Nature has really honed in on advancing climate leadership in higher education. 
HOST: Do you continue to kind of work together and interact with Second Nature? 

JD: Yeah, we meet pretty regularly. Our executive director and the executive director of 
Second Nature have a standing like monthly meeting to try to coordinate our work. We 
don't have any direct collaborations right now, but we partnered on a webinar last year 
with the Department of Energy to help folks figure out how to take advantage of the 
different federal support for sustainability. So, there's some of that happening and we 
collaborate so they work, their greenhouse gas reporting, so they collect greenhouse 
gas data for members or signatories of the Second Nature climate leadership 
commitments and we've tried to align the data that we collect in our STARS with the 
format that they are using as well, and even created some ways to make it easy to sort 
of port back and forth. It's not a direct like click a button kind of thing, but we've tried to 
simplify that process for institutions that are doing both. So there is some of that kind of 
coordination and alignment. happening, and like I said, we're always looking for 
opportunities. But yeah, that's what we have right now. 

HOST: Thank you for making the distinction with Second Nature really being a climate 
change focused organization and AASHE's role in really kind of focus on sustainability. 
What does that mean to AASHE? And give us some examples of some of the work that 
maybe the member colleges do or some of the things that, you know, how do they take 
advantage of the network and the kind of focus on sustainability? 

JD:Yeah, so one of the beautiful things about sustainability, but also one of the 
challenges is that it is an expansive concept. and it can mean a lot of different things 
and as a result our membership is doing a pretty wide range of different things. So on 
one hand, there's a whole piece that's focused on curriculum and infusing sustainability 
across the curriculum ensuring that graduates have foundational knowledge of 
sustainability and are equipped with the skills. to help solve sustainability challenges. 
So, that's one whole area of work. There's folks working on the research side. Higher 
Ed has an enormous contribution to make in terms of the research that it's doing. For 
example, discovering new sustainable technologies and piloting them, all that kind of 
thing, is another. area of work. Then there's the physical operations of the campus 
which is what a good chunk of our members are focused on and in that dimension 
they're looking at how do we reduce the campus's greenhouse gas emissions? How do 
we reduce the waste output from the campus? How do we reduce our water use? How 
do we transition to renewable energy? How do we manage our campus grounds more 
sustainably? How do we rewild our campus? How do we manage our buildings more 
sustainably? So there's a whole realm of campus operations, and then the last kind of, 
well, maybe two more buckets there is engagement. So how do we engage our campus 
and our external community, in conversations around sustainability. So more sort of 
informal education, it's not the formal curriculum, but there's lots of co-curricular 
programs and community partnerships and that type of work that can relate to 
sustainability and that our members are doing, and for us, a key part of sustainability, 
we don't think of sustainability as just just sort of another word for environmentalism. We 
do really try to take seriously the social dimensions of sustainability. So-- - 

HOST: What do you mean by that?

JD: So it can mean a lot of different things, but I'll talk about it in the context of STARS 
'cause it's the most concrete. Where we do have indicators for the-- for a whole number 
of things related to social sustainability. So we look at employee compensation, are 
employees being paid a living wage? OK, we look at affordability issues. So can people 
afford to go to this institution or is it price so that it's only the most wealthy that can take 
advantage of it? Got it. What support is there for students from marginalized groups? 
and how well are they integrated into the fabric of the institution, how welcoming is the 
campus climate. So there's a variety of things around diversity, equity, inclusion. We'll 
look at some governance issues. So who's included in the governance bodies? Do 
students have a voice in institutional governance? Do faculty and staff have a voice in 
institutional governance? We'll look at that. some socially responsible investment type 
questions. So that's, at a big level, what I mean is caring for people. It'd be like the most 
summary type thing you could give it in addition to the planet. 

HOST: Got it, got it. OK. So I do want to talk about, as we mentioned, we do want to 
talk about-- But, and we'll get to that in a moment. But how have you, you know, as a, 
you know, with your history with the organization, how has it, has the mission evolved 
with the growing awareness of and alarmed by, you know, kind of climate change and 
the increasing number of weather events and disasters and increased temperature of 
the planet that we've seen. Have you seen an uptick in interest? Have your colleges, 
college members, you know-- been talking to you about, kind of, an increased focus on 
sustainability around the kind of urgent climate issues that we're hearing about. But 
what is the, that, has there been an arc to that over the years of the organization? 

JD: Somewhat, but maybe less than than we might hope. and there's a couple reasons 
for that. So partly the institutions that are engaged with AASHE, many of them are not 
new to climate, right? So with Second Nature, we started the American College and 
University Presidents Climate Equipment in the like 2006 is when we kicked that off, 
right? And we were able to recruit 700 or so campuses in the first couple years. to make 
a commitment to carbon neutrality. Many of those 700 campuses are still the bulk of our 
membership and Second Natures as well. So we're working with institutions that have 
some history here and they're not new to the climate emergency. Now things may have 
it's become more obvious and more dire in a way. But it's not like what we're seeing is a 
surprise. It's what folks were predicting at that stage. So in that sense, the main thing 
that we see that's happening among our membership is just some greater 
sophistication, and many of them are making not necessarily at the speed that like and 
the extent that we'd like, but are making real progress in decarbonizing their campuses. 
There have been things that we couldn't have even imagined back when we started, but 
major investments in renewable energy and trying to shift their consumption away from 
fossil fuel-derived electricity to renewable. electricity, which is really pretty significant. 
We're also seeing interest in sort of campus electrification and then trying to shift the the 
heating load to renewable as well. Heating has always been a little bit more challenging 
because it's typically combustion based, but we are seeing a real growth and interest in 
geothermal type strategies, right? Then also heat pumps, air source heat pumps as 
well, maybe water source on occasion, but other kinds of electricity-based heating 
systems as a way to get off fossil fuels. So there has been a sort of growth in 
sophisticatedÑ of the strategies and just the investment that our members are making 
to address climate change, and, in parallel with that, the thing that has maybe changed 
is the greater attention to climate resilience, because, and we are now seeing some of 
the consequences more clearly, or like more directly, I should say, that campuses have 
to be really thinking a little bit more about, you know, if you're in Miami, for example, you 
got to be thinking about sea level rise, right, as a real concern, and other places are 
thinking about flooding, other places are thinking about-we're worried about forest fires 
and the increase in wildfires that we've been seeing. We're worried about droughts in 
some cases and water supply. So, some of the sustainability challenges that we 
anticipate are going to be intensifying over the next, well, who knows how long, but it's 
going to be intensifying over quite a significant period. Campuses need to be planning 
for that and we're seeing some more focus in those areas. 

HOST: Sticking on the topic of campus resilience and the physical plant of the campus 
are there any member colleges in your network that stand out as doing kind of 
innovative, interesting thing, or maybe are fairly advanced in their planning? I know you 
got a role with it. You can't be stationary, but any of your members stand out that you 
wanna tell us about? 

JD: Not really in this particular case. Not because there's not interesting things 
happening. I'm just, I think the conversations there, it's it's difficult and I don't have a 
campus and like, yeah, they've really have figured this out. I think it's much more in the 
we are trying to figure it out rather than like, oh, yeah, we've got this, you know, solved 
because it's a long term challenge and it requires in many cases, cases, significant 
allocation of resources with it unclear. 

HOST: I guess I'm, you know, one of the things that I think, one of the challenges of 
this, of the many challenges and the thing that's interesting for me is it really demands 
of, I think, most higher ed institutions, a kind of a larger partnership with-- they are 
located in regions, in states, or countries. They're located in cities. They are located in 
places where it can't just be the university or college solving-- a problem for their 
campus, but really kind of is integrated with the wider area where the college is located, 
and I think for some institutions, that could be a big challenge, or at least a different way 
of doing things, right, than they're used to, and so I know that there are really -- I know 
Dickinson College I believe is a member and they often come up as a real -- doing 
some interesting work and a real focus on this issue, but I don't know if anything stands 
out with -- interesting approaches colleges are taking to do this and maybe not sort of 
solving it but in engaging in ways that that may be a little unique. 

JD: I think you're right that in in the context of sort of how higher ed operates resilience 
conversations do pose some unique challenges and do require much greater um 
interaction and relationship with the surrounding community because it's very difficult to 
be sort of an island of resilience if the surrounding community has not like solved the 
problem. You can't really solve most of these issues at a campus level. A campus that 
comes to mind, even though I don't know a tremendous amount about the details, but 
our conference was in Boston this year and Northeastern University as it is in Boston, 
and they have been developing their climate action plan with a real focus on community 
engagement and trying to understand how the campus can assist the community at 
large in addressing or how to resolve these different natural unnatural challenges and 
disasters. So heatwaves, what's the role of the campus in a heatwave and can it provide 
cooling stations or places for people to go to escape the heatwave? So that's I think a 
really interesting conversation that is definitely not a traditional role for higher ed. I mean 
higher ed always have some connection with its community. But a much closer 
collaboration than perhaps has typically been the case. 

HOST: Yeah, I think that I mean, I think typically community colleges are are a little 
better at that as their name implies, you know, they're in communities and and yeah for 
sure with their workforce focus often, you know makes that a little bit more necessary 
But even on that level, I think that the kinds of ways that a college in a, let's say a 
metropolitan area or city government or whatever, you know, would need to work 
together, I think, is a different kind of animal.

JD: Yeah. Ð 

HOST: So one of the things that you mentioned that, that I certainly want to talk about is 
the idea of curriculum and you have as part of your membership or part of the things 
that that the work that AASHE does are called Centers for Sustainability Across the 
Curriculum. You want to talk a little bit, tell us a little bit of what what that is and what 
that work entails. 

JD: Sure, so maybe to start sort of big picture why we think curriculum is so important 
and the basic idea is that the education is the primary thing that higher ed does, right? 
It's its core mission is to educate students, and when you think about how higher 
education can be useful in overcoming and addressing sustainability challenges, I think 
people often tend to think about, well, they've got to reduce their own impact. So all the 
operational stuff that I mentioned earlier, and that is important. But, you know, when you 
look at it in the sort of bigger scale of things, higher education's physical impact, or let's 
say in this carbon footprint, is a small percentage of the total national or global you 
know carbon footprint. But higher education's educational footprint is enormous. 
Basically all the the decision makers who in society are politicians, are business 
leaders, cultural and spiritual leaders. They're all going through higher education almost, 
and there's only in the US at least, about 4,000 institutions of higher education. That's a 
lot, but it's a much smaller kind of, it's a manageable number of entities that one can. 
imagine if they all shifted to models of sustainability and we're integrating sustainability 
into the curriculum like you could fairly quickly transform how the whole society is 
thinking about sustainability and so for me that's one of the real potential contributions 
of higher education is in that curriculum side is in ensuring that its graduates have the 
knowledge and skills to solve sustainability challenges. 

HOST: So what does that look like? Is it you say, here's the curriculum? 

JD: No, that doesn't work. 

HOST: I'm just kidding. 

JD: Yeah. So I mean, we don't tell people what to teach at all. The model, and this is a 
good segue to talking about the centers, but the model that we have been promoting for 
many years and it's based on something that was pioneered at Northern Arizona 
University in the Ponderosa project and then further developed at Emory University and 
where they call it the Piedmont project, but it's this model of infusing sustainability 
across the curriculum that brings together faculty from a range of disciplines, and it 
gives them some prompts, it gives them some education around sustainability, but it 
mostly is about creating the space for them to think through in a supportive way how 
sustainability might fit into their discipline and the courses that they teach. So nobody's 
being told. you have to teach this or this is the way to teach it. It's giving them space 
and a community of supportive people in which to think about that, and it's been 
enormously successful at a range of campuses after, you know, the two that I 
mentioned, Northern Arizona and Emory. We've been doing workshops with the leaders 
of those two programs for for two decades now almost, and training other faculty in that 
model. Then they go back to their campuses and start similar programs, and like I said, 
they've been quite effective. Dickinson, you mentioned earlier, they actually are an 
institution that has one of these programs quite successful. They've trained a huge 
percentage of their faculty has gone through one of these trainings and typically they 
include some kind of stipend for the participants but you only get the stipend after you 
have turned in and shown yes I've revised my syllabi or I've created a new course on 
this topic. So there is an incentive. incentive to do so, but you're not required to and it's 
totally possible to attend and decide that it's not really for me and just go on to 
something else, so they're really careful to avoid any kind of infringements upon 
academic freedom. It's not going to work, right? That is going to run into all kinds of 
resistance and just not be effective. So, it is much more about leading folks through a 
supportive process where they are excited about it because faculty want their courses 
to be relevant to current challenges. They want to address contemporary issues. So, 
once you give them that space and a little bit of some prompts and some support, you'll 
very creative in thinking about new and different ways to do it and then you just get this 
sort of blossoming of different approaches rather than kind of a monoculture of this is 
the module that everybody must use. So anyway, so that model has been growing and 
spreading to a range of different campuses, and so where the centers come in is we 
realized this model was great, but not every school had the resources or support to 
create their own version of the Ponderosa and Piedmont project, and, or at least we 
weren't reaching, we weren't expanding the number of schools that had these programs 
quickly enough to reach, to get the level of change that we want. So we thought, What if 
we worked with institutions that have now been doing this for a number of years and 
had some success on their own campus and could they open up their workshops to 
faculty from other institutions so that we can start to begin to expand the number of 
faculty that we're reaching? And so we put out a call to see if you've been doing training 
on your campus for a while and are interested in working with us to open up, let us 
know, and we selected -- we started with about a dozen centers. We're now up to 17, I 
think, and so they're scattered across most of the U.S. We've got a couple in Canada 
and even one in Hong Kong, and their only requirement to be a center is to offer at least 
one workshop over each year that is open to faculty from other institutions, and we help 
them promote it so they get the word out at least to our network. promote it to their own 
networks as well and the exact focus of the workshop is really up to them. 

We've had quite a bit of diversity here. We had one workshop that was really on using 
the campus as a living lab. We've had others on indigenous environmental knowledge. 
So they can be quite focused on different aspects of sustainability. They're not all like 
this is sustainability 101. Because we have a range of centers with different areas of 
expertise and interest, it enables us to offer a wide range of training to meet different 
needs. There have been some on climate education specifically, environmental justice. 
So, it's been really interesting to see how the centers take up the the challenge and and 
create programming that they think is going to be relevant to faculty from other 
institutions. 

HOST: Okay, so and so the the curricula as it as it were is really set by these the I 
guess hosting institutions Or is it coordinated in some way? Or is this a kind of organic? 

JD: It's pretty organic. We do meet with the centers as a group a couple times a year 
just to like check on how are things going, what are you planning for the next year. So 
there's some very light coordination in that sense that if the two are planning to do 
something of similar, maybe they collaborate or maybe they at least try to schedule 
them so that they're not overlapping. We've had a bit of challenge over the years in that 
many campuses, for reasons that are probably pretty obvious, like to do their workshops 
around the same time of year, which is often near the end of a semester. So January is 
a time when in campuses sometimes do this because it's, you know, you finish the 
firstÑ

HOST: The academic calendar.

JD: Exactly, it kind of drives the scheduling a little bit, and we're having a time when like 
May and June, we're just, there was a whole clump of workshops to the degree where 
they, it's possible they were competing with one another a little bit. because although we 
had originally conceptualized these workshops as mostly attracting a local audience, so 
the original idea was let's have one in every state and that would be the center that 
trains people within that state. It hasn't really worked that way. We'll have some that are 
kind of their national workshop and they'll draw people from all over the place. While 
others might be more regional in scope. So it's been sort of variable in that sense as 
well So anyway, we did have a you know a glut in in May and June that's been resolved 
a little bit but it's still there are tend to be quite a few at that time of year just because it's 
a convenient time for faculty to Get to go to a training like this. 

HOST: So so a member is you know a member institution could as part of this get -- 
send someone to be trained by AASHE and come back and do more of an institutional 
trainings for their faculty over a longer term or if the resources aren't there for that 
college they can send a handful of faculty or trainers I guess the people that are going 
to be trained, to these, they go actually go to, for example, Dickinson College on 
campus or they are they held online or both? 

JD: Both actually, most are in person but especially during the pandemic folks shifted 
online but even before the pandemic we had a few centers that offered their training 
online so again diversity in the ways in which campuses or centers are approaching 
their kind of obligation to do an annual workshop. We encourage that. We're not trying 
to sort of mandate any particular way. 

HOST: Is there a network, I suppose, that has emerged around this amongst the faculty 
that are, time trainers or participants? Do you know if there's a ongoing, seems like a 
good opportunity at least for kind of ongoing relationships to you know knowledge 
exchange and is that is that part of this at all? 

JD: Yes, although we haven't been as effective at facilitating, like that was part of the 
vision that we imagined that by bringing these different centers together, they would be 
sharing their knowledge and experience from one another and helping sort of grow the 
field, and it happens a little bit. But when we get together as a group, or like I said, 
there's 17 or so centers, not all of them will show up, but there's still like, you know, 14, 
15 people on a call typically, and so they're all sharing a little bit, but it's not. about what 
they're up to, but there hasn't been that much of the like, kind of gelling of let's do 
something as a group. Although some of them, you know, we've had a few centers get 
together to do a workshop, like at our conference or other conferences, so there is 
some collaboration happening. We do have a listserv for the centers. enables them to 
communicate with one another. We also have an online community for not just for the 
centers but for any of the faculty that have that are doing this kind of sustainability 
across the curriculum work. So there is some dialogue happening there and some 
collaboration. There is a group that's been working on trying to figure out what the 
difference is how to make sustainability competencies and identify relevant 
sustainability competencies for different disciplines. So, there are some interesting 
things coming out of it, but that's like a little small subgroup. So, different projects kind of 
emerge out of it, but like the community itself of the larger community is not super 
active. right now I don't think it's quite big enough to get that critical mass, but we are 
continuing to grow it every year by doing more training, so that's our hope that there can 
be some of that shared learning and so that the innovations that are successful are 
spread across the network faster. 

HOST:Éwhich may be think and want to confirm this is not just for you know biology 
and you know more STEM faculty I am assuming that if I'm a poetry faculty member or 
you know in this other kind of disciplines outside of STEM that you might not 
immediately think of around sustainability is a part of this as well? 

JD: Yeah, they're intended to be very interdisciplinary. So, art history folks have come 
to these workshops. It is not intended, so I should clarify, that the centers, some of them 
do do very specific workshops that are maybe somewhat more discipline centric, but not 
necessarily. Again, they choose what they're gonna do. Our, the core model, the 
Piedmont Ponderosa project model, is based on bringing faculty from any discipline on 
a campus together to think about what sustainability means for. them and their 
discipline and how they might do it in their own course, and it really is intended to be 
open to anybody and is enhanced by the participation of folks from a wide range of 
disciplines rather than just one or you know one segment of campus. 

HOST: So these centers and these these trainings around sustainability in the 
curriculum is is one area of focus for AASHE. You also have a mentorship program, you 
know, and we had just mentioned this idea of community of practice, but what does the 
mentorship program look like? How would a college participate or facilitate that? 

JD: Basically every summer we put out a call for mentors and mentees. and also peer 
collaborators is a third category we have for people who don't want the implied 
hierarchy between a mentor and a mentee but want to collaborate with somebody right 
um so we put out an open call uh anybody uh from member organization can apply and 
say they want to be one or more of those uh categories and then we do our best to 
match people based on interest and what they're working on and what they express 
they are looking for, and we'll often do a lot of kind of outside recruitment once we see 
the pool because every year we've done this and it's now I think we're in our fifth year or 
something like that. We have more mentee mentees than we do mentors and so it's 
usually we then try to find if there's a mentee that we couldn't match we didn't have 
enough people for them or they had a more specific need we try to find is there 
somebody in our community that we know of that would be a good match for what 
they're looking for and so lot of direct recruitment. So every year we end up matching 
somewhere around 80 to 100 pairs, so meaning 160 to 200 people, and there's always 
some that we can't match because they have very narrow interests. 

HOST: Can you give us an example of what someone might, so you know, potential 
mentee might you know..? 

JD: Sure so they might say looking for i'm we're embarking on a redo of our climate 
action plan or developing climate action plan for our first time i'm really looking to meet 
with somebody who's who's gone through this process before and could walk me 
through the pitfalls or help me with stakeholder engagement or whatever you know 
whatever their particular concern is with in relation to the climate action plan We have 
people do it for STARS, too. I'm doing my first STARS report this year. I'd love to talk to 
somebody more experienced. A lot of folks are just looking like they're early in their 
career and they would like to talk to a more senior sustainability leader to help them 
think through how to grow in their career and get to be a sustainability director at some 
point. could be working on a waste reduction project and want somebody with that 
expertise. So it really does run the gamut of, you know, a faculty member looking for 
some particular, you know, peer partnership to a sustainability kind of professionals, 
more administrative, campus plan kind of things that could be anybody at that 
institutionÉ

HOST: Could could anybody could fill out this application and looking for support or vice 
versa? 

JD: Correct. Yeah, we even have students who apply and they're sometimes a little bit 
harder to match and same thing faculty too can be a little bit harder because they might 
have like a specific research interest where it's like I'm interested in sustainability and 
health care and I'm looking to find somebody who wants to like work with me on that. 
don't get anybody who applied to who is looking for that match. I might try to find 
somebody but that's like a little bit harder sometimes. I think we had somebody who was 
really interested in sustainability in dental schools this year. Okay, and I found some 
other people who were doing sustainability in dentistry education but they they weren't 
part of our networks that when I reached out, they did respond. They're like, they 
passed on the opportunity, I guess. So I think we weren't able to make a match in that 
situation. But like I said, we always try to meet people where they're at and find 
something that fits their needs. We have a pretty good track record. Not all matches 
work, obviously, and some people apply and then decide it's not for them. I think as a 
program it worked pretty well and we've had some like lifelong Or what we assume will 
be lifelong connections come out of it like really strong relationships where people 
continue to meet 

HOST: What are the formal bounds around this is it just a one-year program one year?

JD: Yeah, so we match you in September typically and then you've got the full 
academic year, and by June, we're sort of wrapping up and beginning to start to recruit 
next year's cohort. But we have, there's one group, they apply every year, and one 
team, or dyad, I guess, two people, they apply every year, and they asked to be 
matched with each other again. So like, I don't really know, they don't need us to like 
formalize it. But for some reason, that's important to them. So they apply every year and 
like, "I'd like to be matched with so and so." Okay, we're happy to do it. 

HOST: So do you do get anything? I mean, yeah, in quotes, right? So it's just a 
matching service and then you leave it to the mentee and mentor to kind of connect. 

JD: It's pretty open-ended. We do have, there's like a little handbook with some 
guidance on like how to the most out of the relationship. We send a few prompts over 
the course of the year, sort of encouraging them. I mean, we encourage them to meet at 
least once a month, by phone at least, if not in person, because they're often 
geographically disparate, and we'll ask them to set some goals for the years that they 
can report to us. So, there's a few, a little bit of structure. But it really does, the success 
of it really does depend upon the mentee and mentor actually taking the time to connect 
with one another and decide what they want to do and then doing it. We can only do so 
much to kind of hold their hands. So matching is the bulk of the thing that we provide. 
and then it is mostly up to them within the context of what we provide. 

HOST: Got it. Well, we did say earlier that we wanted to talk about what we refer to as 
STARS, which is the Sustainability Tracking Assessment and Rating System, which is 
another project, I guess, of AASHE. Tell us a bit of what STARS is, you know, what is it, 
how did it emerge, how it's being used? 

JD: Yeah, so big picture, it's a tool that campuses use to measure and report on their 
sustainability performance. They track a ton of, or they collect a ton of data, enter it into 
this online reporting form that we have. It's scored according to a pretty detailed 
methodology. and then based on that score they get a rating. So you can be, for 
example, a STARS silver or STARS gold, STARS platinum institution, and it's a pretty 
comprehensive assessment system. I mentioned earlier that we really try to take the 
social dimensions of sustainability seriously within STARS as well as our other 
programs. It gets all the campus operations stuff. got curriculum, it's got research, the 
engagement stuff I mentioned earlier, the governance, planning, social equity, all of that 
is in here, and anyway, once you complete your you submit all this data to us, we 
review it, you get your rating, then all that data lives on our website. So any you can 
anybody can go and look at an institution's STARS report, see how they scored, see 
where they did well, maybe where they didn't. But it's also a fabulous way to learn about 
who's doing what, right? Which is kind of, again, our core function is to help our 
community learn from one another, and so STARS is a key way that we do that 
because, like I said, you can go and look and see who... who did well and how they did 
that well and what they're doing. You'd find a list of everybody who scored, you know, 

HOST: Well in this credit, that kind of thing, and how long is this program, the STARS? 

JD: Yeah, we started working on it in 2006, was the first we kind of announced at the 
very first AC Conference in concept, and then it took us about three years of developing 
some drafts and then pilot testing it before we had something that we felt like was good 
enough to make sort of an official release, and so in 2009 is when STARS actually 
came out and you could start to submit data, and so, yeah, it's going on 15 years now, 
and it's evolved quite a bit over time. We do update it on a semi-regular basis. We try 
not to change it too quickly because our community, on the one hand, they want us to 
fix things and change things and make it better, but there's also some, you get kind of 
locked in to like, "Well, this is the data that he wants, and when we change it, it can 
make some other challenges. So we try to balance that desire for change and growth 
with the desire for some consistency. So it doesn't change super quickly, but we started 
with version 1.0, and then we did 1.1, 1.2 in 2018. 2016 I think we released version 2 
And then 2.1, 2.2 is the current version and we're about to release version 3.0 later this 
year. So, you know, it's gone through two major revisions basically and some smaller 
ones as well. 

HOST: What are some of the can you characterize some of the updates for version 3? 
Sure. 

JD: So, a lot of it is sort of smaller tweaks to the credits that make them a little bit just 
easier or provide more comparable data but kind of the big picture things that I think 
folks will notice. So, one of those is that we've really tried to streamline STARS. One of 
the biggest barriers to adoption is it's a pretty big involved process to do STARS, and so 
we knew that that was something we wanted to focus on and we did end up cutting a lot 
of data fields. Most of them were optional. It's not like it's hugely saving, but I think in 
total, the number of data fields has been cut by around 40% from version 2.2. So that's 
pretty significant, and it should make STARS quite a bit more approachable and just 
spend a little bit less time on just trying to gather all the data, right? 

HOST: Right. 

JD: But we haven't cut the scope at all. In fact, the scope has increased a little bit, the 
topical scope, and we've strengthened a couple areas. So one area that we really 
focused on this time around was the social equity section. Historically, that part of 
STARS has been fairly qualitative, didn't have a lot of quantitative metrics, and we felt 
that wasn't doing the best job of distinguishing between real leaders in that area and 
folks who have some room for improvement, and so, shifting to more quantitative 
metrics, I think, is going to give us a little bit more insight into what's going on and just 
make that section of STARS more robust. 

HOST: So that'sÉ What kind of metrics have you added? 

JD: Yeah. Good question. So, let me just -- so I don't give some specific examples. So, 
we have some credits on gender parity that we didn't used to have. We're looking more 
at the racial and ethnic diversity of the campus population. So, before we asked 
qualitatively about what kind of support programs exist now, we're actually trying to get 
the percentage data, right? So, what percentage of your student body is marginalized 
racial, ethnic, or indigenous groups and how does that compare to the body that you-- 
the state or region that you serve? We're asking about student success rates too, so 
how does the completion rate for low-income students differ than the student body as a 
whole or for students from marginalized groups. So that's some of the more quantitative 
metrics that we're looking at. We also try to get affordability in more of a quantitative 
way. We're asking now about the number of paid work hours per year required to meet 
the average net price for low-income students which is a fairly common way that we've 
seen of assessing affordability but again we didn't have that. It was more qualitative in 
previous versions of STARS. 

HOST: That's an interesting, fairly global perspective around sustainability. You're really 
getting at this kind of fundamental institutional metrics, which I think is really, really 
interesting. 

JD: Yeah, we're trying to, and we are also, you may think with the word global, trying to 
be more globally applicable with this round of STARS. 

HOST: So STARS-- I should say, I don't think what-- if we made that this clear earlier, 
you are a global organization. You mentioned a college in Hong Kong, but you do have 
institutions outside the outside the U.S. Correct. 

JD: Yeah. So our you know, our most of our staff live in the U.S. and most of our 
members are in the U.S. and quite a few in Canada. So U.S. and Canada is our kind of 
core countries. But, we do have members from around the world and certainly in any of 
our programs, participants from all over the place. STARS in particular, we've made an 
effort to recruit participants from other parts of the world because we think it has 
potential to serve as a global standard in a way that 

HOST: Yeah, I think, you know, when I first heard about STARS and kind of cursorily 
read about it, it, you know, I thought, oh, this is a kind of LEED certification, but I'm not 
saying that's correct necessarily, but how do institutions, you know, when the institution 
says, you know, we think we want to do this, we want to enter into the STARS process 
and start this reporting and see where we can get. What's the, what's the rationale? Is it 
mostly internal? Like, here's a way to help us achieve our sustainability goals. Is it 
external where you use your STARS, you know, rating to promote the institution? Is it 
both? Is there a way to characterize kind of the main reason that an institution may want 
to, you know, undergo what you said is a pretty a pretty comprehensive process. 

JD: Yeah, it is a little bit of both. So, and it varies by institution, but some institutions it is 
much more focused on the internal, right? They're looking for a way to assess their own 
progress, maybe communicate. indicate that to their stakeholders at the campus. 
Maybe they put it in their own strategic plan that we have a goal to achieve a certain 
rating by a certain date. That's something we're seeing a little bit of. Maybe they just 
want to be able to benchmark and make the case to the institutional leadership that we 
need to invest more in this area because we're falling behind our peers. and they're not 
even going to promote the rating. So that can happen. But I think the external is 
important for most folks as well. They like that validation that because STARS does 
provides an overall score and a rating, it to sort of simply communicate sustainability 
performance to external audiences that, you know, they can look at a sustainability 
report with a bunch of data, but it doesn't really tell you much about how is this 
institution performing relative to other institutions. STARS does that in a way that is, you 
know, fairly well supported because you can go and data and see why an institution 
scored better than another and we have all that data publicly and we do make a real 
effort to check some of the data and credits are well-defined. So it's again it's pretty 
rigorous and that enables it to be meaningful for making external comparisons so yeah 
institutions can be pretty proud of their ratings we've seen Thompson University in 
Canada. They were, I think, the first STARS Platinum institution in Canada. 

HOST: That's the highest rating? 

JD: Yes, STARS Platinum is the highest rating, exactly, and there's only less than 20 of 
them. I don't remember exactly how many there are at the moment, but there's not a 
ton. It is pretty hard to get STARS Platinum, but they bought themselves a STARS 
Platinum, like black and put it like a pretty big plaque and it's on the outside of their 
sustainability office. We've seen other institutions in the University of New Hampshire is 
another Stars Platinum Institution. They had the little banners hanging off of light posts 
around campus to celebrate their Stars Platinum rating. So I think that the branding part 
of it is, that's really important for many folks. The other thing I should mention is that 
STARS also feeds into the Princeton Review green rankings. So Princeton Review is a 
test prep but also college information service, and they do a whole variety of rankings, 
including a sustainability ranking, or they call it the green ranking, and they use STARS 
data for that, and so, when you participate in STARS, you can opt in to have us share 
the data you've provided to us to Princeton Review, and then Princeton Review, they 
run it through their own scoring methodology, and they only look at a subset of what the 
things that we're looking at, but they come up with their own score and then publish 
every year their own green ratings. 

HOST: Has the participation in STARS, is it growing? Is it, is there increased interest? 
Does it remain steady? And how long do you, you know, if you get a platinum or gold 
rating, how long does that, do you get to keep that before having to report again, is it a 
yearly process? 

JD: Yeah the ratings are good for three years or up to three years. You can resubmit as 
often as once a year and there's a good number of institutions that just have made an 
annual process because it in a way makes it more manageable, but you keep your 
rating for for three years if you don't resubmit. In terms of how it's changed over time, 
we have had pretty steady growth, but it has more plateaued recently. We haven't been 
seeing a ton of growth in recent years, and that's the same with AASHE's membership 
generally, so it's an area that we're part of that streamline. I mentioned earlier that's 
embedded in 3.0 is an attempt to help to boost those numbers by making it more 
accessible. I think the problem that we have is that we have most campuses that have a 
paid sustainability staff person and are plausibly interested in this are doing it already. 
So it's how do we make this accessible for institutions that maybe don't have a 
sustainability staff person to do the work. So, if it's just a sustainability committee made 
up of volunteers or there's an interested faculty member, can we make this something 
that a class could feasibly do over a semester or even a couple semesters maybe? 
there yet but it's getting closer to that and we're also looking at can we produce some 
resources to help faculty if they wanted to do that and we've started doing something 
too we do a star the last couple years we've done a STARS support cohort for folks that 
are doing STARS for the first time and want to use for somebody to hold their hand 
through the process. So they have monthly meetings with an AASHE staff person, 
access to a private group in our online community where they can connect with the 
other participants and we try to lead them through the steps and try to help them 
understand where they should focus their efforts initially and get them to finish their 
submission. the end of the year, and that's been, I think, successful at helping some of 
those institutions that were, that want to do it, but were maybe a little bit intimidated, 
because it is, especially if you're somebody taking this on as like an additional project, 
and it's not part of your job, like it might be for a sustainability staff person. The technical 
manual is over 300 pages, right? So you open that thing up. and you're like, "Oh my 
gosh, I can't feasibly do this." And I think it looks more intimidating than it is, but it is a 
big task and you do have to engage with a whole range of stakeholders on your campus 
and collect a lot of data and then put it into our system. So, yeah, we're always looking 
at how we can make it work. how we can. make it so that institutions don't need to have 
a paid sustainability staff person to do it, but without losing the rigor that makes it 
meaningful as well. That's a real tough balance. So we'll see how this next version goes 
and if we see a little bit more uptake from institutions in that situation. 

HOST: So I want to wrap up our conversation today, which has been really great, really 
learned a lot and it's great to hear about how much AASHE is doing to support their 
members and with this focus on sustainability. But I do want to step back a bit. Again, 
you know, if you could call higher ed a sector, which may be a good idea, but maybe 
that isn't something you could really kind of do. It doesn't really, higher ed often doesn't 
work in any kind of connected way. But thinking of higher ed in the United States, or you 
can think about it globally, and with your long history of working at AASHE, how do you 
think higher ed is responding to this climate emergency? And what do you think needs 
to happen? Something that maybe AAASHE can facilitate or other things, what are 
some ways that you might, that you see are a direction that, you know, an administrator, 
a president of a college listening, you know, might need to hear to really address the 
crisis that we're in. 

JD: Yeah. So to answer the first part of the question, big picture, how is higher ed 
responding, I'd say insufficiently. I don't think as a sector that we are doing enough to 
address the climate crisis, like at all, and there's a, you know, I'm, ASHA's membership 
is not even a quarter of higher ed institutions in the United States. 

HOST: What is your membership? 

JD: Somewhere around 800 institutions, and again, probably. probably 100 or so of 
those in other parts of the world at least. Even within Asia, we're not really reaching less 
than a quarter of higher ed institutions in this country, let alone the rest of the world, and 
I don't think it's entirely true that three quarters that we're not reaching is doing nothing. 
Sure, but I don't think they're doing a lot and so that does to me speak to a real failure of 
leadership within our sector and what I'd like to see happen or is for climate to have the 
same level level of executive attention and mobilization that maybe not the same, but 
something comparable to COVID, right? Every institution had to take COVID seriously 
immediately. Many of them shut down for weeks, months, whole semesters, and totally 
shifted what they're doing. They made major changes with remarkable speed, which 
indicates that change is possible in certain circumstances at least and what would it 
look like to take the climate emergency with that degree of seriousness? I don't think it 
has to mean shutting down immediately or anything. I think there are very real things 
campuses can do that are less disruptive than the COVID response, but they need to 
make those investments. They need to start thinking about how they shift to renewable 
energy, and not just like a few solar panels on a building, but shifting the entire 
campus's energy demand to renewable sources. How do they do that? It can be a long-
term challenge, especially if you've invested in a new heating plant, plant that's fossil 
fuel-based, but they're still near electric. Like, there's major things campuses can do 
that are difficult, but certainly not undoable for many institutions, and

HOST: What about at the curriculum level, which is another shift? Are you hopeful 
about that? Do you see more progress with that or is it similar? 

JD: Maybe less progress honestly. So campus operations, there's been a lot of stuff 
happening on the curriculum side. There is a lot of stuff happening and I really don't 
want to minimize that because it 

HOST: Yeah yeah let's be clear but that yeah we're talking about a broad sector you 
know and some generalizations here. 

JD: Exactly. I want to celebrate all the amazing things that are happening while 
acknowledging that it's probably not enough, or at least it's not matching what I think 
higher education's potential contributions are. So on the curricular side, I think there's 
two kind of major areas of development that we encourage. So one is the sustainability 
across the curriculum, trying to figure out how to get sustainability across the 
disciplines, in ways that are discipline specific. I don't think it has to be like everybody 
gets the same sustainability 101 course, but if you're in the engineering program, how 
do you think about how sustainability relates to engineers? It's going to be a pretty 
significant part of their career in all likelihood. So how do-- and they have a real 
opportunity to impact negatively or positively the problem. How do we sort of push 
towards positive impacts? So that's a-- and you can do that through programs like we 
encourage with Piedmont and Ponderosa, the other kinds of course incentives. There's 
a whole variety. of options there. Different cluster hires around sustainability I think are 
interesting, but there is some movement in creating requirements that all students do 
some kind of sustainability or climate course. The University of California San Diego just 
adopted a requirement that other students have to take a course around climate. Not all 
the same course necessarily, but there's a range of courses that can count, just like 
other gen ed requirements. 

HOST: Gen ed requirements, yep. 

JD: Yeah, exactly, and I think that's really interesting as an approach to try to ensure 
that all students have at least some foundational understanding of climate. sustainability 
and their role in it. So anyway that's one is the foundational knowledge for everybody 
ideally with a discipline lens so they really understand how it relates to their discipline 
and doesn't feel like something they're just forced to go through and doesn't really relate 
to them. But then I think you also need for students that are going to be make solving 
sustainability challenges their career academic programs in sustainability, and there are 
a number of those that have been created now, but it's still not a super common major 
or minor even, and so creating those kinds of programs that allow students to specialize 
a little bit in sustainability, I think is another track that we see. campus is doing and that 
we encourage and particularly I think it's exciting when it's something that can easily be 
integrated into a second major so or if it is like concentration within an existing major so 
like in let's say if you're doing business there's a sustainable business concentration 
within that. that so that it's you know a real option and hopefully everybody in the 
business school gets some sustainability exposure but there are folks that can get go 
deeper so that's the other main path that we're encouraging on curriculum new 
academic programs certificates minors majors etc. 

HOST: Julian, I want to thank you for your time today. It was a great conversation. 
Really enjoyed it, and thanks for being on the show. 

JD: Yeah, happy to do it. Really enjoyed the conversation and appreciate the 
opportunity to share a little bit about what AASHEÕs up to. 

HOST: Thanks a lot. 

JD: Thank you. 

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Climate.edu is written by me, Richard Sebastian. The theme music is by Serge 
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Climate.edu | Episode 3 Transcript
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