Arizona State is a public university with several campuses in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

At Arizona State, Degree Programs Mark New Commitment to Sustainability

“Sustainability” has in recent years become a watchword in global development and environmental fields. Focusing on a nexus of ecological, economic, and social needs, the sustainability movement seeks to ensure that development and prosperity in the present are not purchased at the expense of future generations.

Higher education increasingly is playing a major role in promoting sustainability, and many campuses now view sustainability as essential to modeling social responsibility as an institutional value. It has become routine for campuses to evaluate building construction, purchasing choices, and energy use for environmental impact. Colleges and universities are also using the concept of sustainability as they develop new curricula and encourage innovation among students and faculty. The emergence of national organizations devoted to sustainability in higher education and the designation of 2005–14 as the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development have further raised higher education’s profile in the sustainability movement.

Arizona State University (ASU), a public university with several campuses in the Phoenix metropolitan area, is one of a number of institutions that are making long-term commitments to sustainability. Building on a history of support for environmental research, ASU will launch the world’s first degree-granting school devoted exclusively to sustainability in 2007. The new School of Sustainability promises to prepare students to address the complex, interdisciplinary challenges of building a sustainable future.

Contexts for Sustainability

In many ways, Arizona State University is a natural fit for sustainability education. ASU’s location in the desert southwest, a region where the problem of sustainability is acutely posed by rapid urban growth and increasing demands upon scarce water resources, provides a special perspective on the tension between development and the environment. This perspective has informed all of the university ’s sustainability work. As James Buizer, the director of the Office of Sustainability Initiatives, notes in a podcast interview on the university’s Web site, ASU aims “to be a force that moves . . . metropolitan Phoenix and the entire Southwest toward a sustainable future.”

The history of ASU’s involvement in environmental issues can be traced back to the founding in 1974 of the Center for Environmental Studies, a unit that supports research and faculty collaboration. The university's emphasis on environmental research was refocused in 2004, when the ASU launched the Global Institute of Sustainability under the leadership of anthropologist Chuck Redman. The institute, which is organized under the broader umbrella of sustainability research, has brought faculty, policy makers, and industry leaders together to study the environmental as well as the social and economic dimensions of sustainable development.

The Global Institute of Sustainability takes advantage of the university’s ability to catalyze research, but it does little to promote sustainability education in the classroom. It was the lack of such an education component that led ASU to plan the creation of the School of Sustainability. Indeed, education may be one of the most effective ways of advancing sustainability: students who learn about sustainability will better understand the environmental implications of their lifestyle choices and will develop the skills and knowledge needed to understand large, real-world problems such as energy consumption, urban growth, and resource management.

ASU students will soon have the opportunity to pursue interdisciplinary degrees in sustainability.

A School of Sustainability

ASU’s School of Sustainability, with Redman serving as interim director, will begin admitting graduate students next spring and undergraduates as early as the fall. It will offer BA and BS degrees at the undergraduate level and MA, MS, and PhD degrees at the graduate level, with the arts degrees designed for those interested in the social sciences or planning and the science degrees designed for those focused on the natural sciences or engineering. Each degree will have its own curriculum and a clearly defined set of learning outcomes.

According to Lisa Murphy, a program development specialist who has been closely involved with planning for the new school, ASU’s sustainability programs will embody interdisciplinary, problem-based, and collaborative approaches to learning. The curriculum will focus especially on six “challenge areas”—urbanization, energy and materials, water, economic development and social transformation, biodiversity, and socioecological resilience—and will culminate with capstone courses in which students focus on one of these areas. “The idea is to have students from all different disciplines . . . choose a problem to work on individually or through a group project,” says Murphy.

The School of Sustainability itself will be fundamentally interdisciplinary in composition. In organizing the curriculum, school planners have turned to faculty in departments and units ranging from architecture to economics, from engineering to law. Most of the school’s faculty will teach through joint appointments, and about half of its courses will be drawn from already existing offerings.

Continuing Challenges

As Chuck Redman and his colleagues plan for the opening of the School of Sustainability next year, the most significant hurdles that face them are practical. The organization of the School of Sustainability will ensure that students graduate with the ability to think critically about sustainability from multiple disciplinary perspectives, but interdisciplinarity also brings administrative problems. Coordinating joint faculty appointments, deciding who gets credit for team-taught courses, and maintaining communication between the school and outside departments are just a few of the challenges that now confront planners.

ASU currently is assembling a leadership committee to manage such administrative details, Murphy says. And the president of ASU, Michael Crow, is overseeing a university-wide sustainability initiative that is raising awareness across academic units about ASU’s emerging sustainability work. In the past six months alone, Crow has held two meetings about sustainability with all of the university’s deans and department chairs, and representatives from each of ASU’s colleges have presented on how they are contributing to the sustainability initiative. These efforts are “getting everyone involved and everyone thinking about where they’re headed,” says Murphy.

Sustainability, in fact, is a cornerstone of the vision for a “new American university” that President Crow brought with him when he came to ASU in 2002. From Murphy’s perspective, the leadership of the university’s president has made all the difference for the campus’s sustainability programs. At every university, Murphy notes, there are individuals who want to launch broad-based sustainability initiatives, but “a lot of universities have a hard time because they don’t have support from the administration.” “We do,” she says, “and I think that’s one of the reasons we will be successful.”

The latest information about the planned School of Sustainability and an overview of ASU’s sustainability work are available on the university’s Web site. ASU is hosting the inaugural North American conference of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education this month, and representatives from ASU will participate in a Campus Sustainability Day Webcast on October 25.

AAC&U supports campus sustainability efforts through its partnership with University Leaders for a Sustainable Future and its work on educating students for a world lived in common.