Colleges and Universities Can be Models of Resilience

Earlier this year I gave a presentation at a regional conference of the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) on how college and university campuses can become resilience hubs. I was recently asked for information on this topic, so decided to upload my presentation so that it can be more widely viewed.

There are a lot of reasons why colleges and universities are so well suited to achieving resilience: the single ownership of a campus; the ability to take a long view on economic return on infrastructure improvements; the legal responsibility for the safety of students; a density that’s well-suited to district heating; the fact that many campuses have their own power plants or even combined heat and power plants; and the commitment that many colleges and universities already have to sustainability. Resilient colleges and universities can even serve the larger communities in which they are located—providing power, emergency housing, water, even food.

The presentation, which you can download, below provides an overview of this issue and profiles a handful of campuses around the country.

2014 SCUP presentation on resilience (9 MB PDF download)

David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.