by Rebecca Walker — March 22, 2010—Industry does a better job of reporting its sustainability efforts than do liberal arts colleges, concludes a study conducted by an environmental biologist at a liberal arts college in California.
“Scholarly institutions are marching to a different drummer,” said J. Emil Morhardt, Ph.D., director of the Roberts Environmental Center at Claremont McKenna College. “Industry has almost universally adopted the sustainability reporting guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), an international industry-supported effort to specify appropriate reporting in excruciating detail for just about every conceivable aspect of environmental and social corporate activity.”
In the Centers 2010 Sustainability Reporting of the Top 50 Liberal Arts Colleges, Morhardt asks, “One question that might come to mind, particularly since so many colleges are now reporting, is why Williams College, which we ranked highest, only receives 40 percent of the possible points on our metric, the Pacific Sustainability Index (PSI), when the top-ranked companies receive 60 percent or more?”
Even though the PSI does not map the GRI guidelines very closely, it does address most of the issues covered by GRI, many of which are hardly ever mentioned by colleges, said Morhardt.
“Colleges, on the other hand, seem not to have heard of GRI, and seem instead to be driven by the Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) and the associated American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC), as well as the Sustainability Endowments Institute (SEI) and its College Sustainability Report Card at greenreportcard.org.”
The GRI G3 reporting guidelines cover a lot more ground than college-specific efforts, in particular information about manufacturing (in which most institutions of higher learning do not engage), and social responsibility to employees and external communities (in which colleges are certainly engaged, but report externally only haphazardly).
Furthermore, students are not employees, and faculty are often treated differently than staff, so there tend to be multiple codes of conduct, different sorts of benefits, and different demographics, decreasing further the parallels with business enterprises and complicating the process of GRI-style reporting even if colleges were so inclined, said Morhardt.
He concludes that even colleges that attempt to report their sustainability, either online or in response to questionnaires, are often not very good at it.
“We judge that neither the PSI nor the College Sustainability Report Card does a good job yet at capturing the actual sustainability of colleges. This will change as external grading becomes more widely cited, providing stronger incentives for high quality sustainability reporting and performance.”
