Scott Carlson notes that SCUP has been a leader in campus sustainability planning and talks about some of the issues currently facing the campus planners among us:

At the annual conference for the Society for College and University Planning, sustainability isn't a foreign notion anymore. After all, SCUPers, as the members of the group call themselves, were among the first to push the tenets of sustainability, whether that be energy efficiency, reduction of carbon emissions, or just plain good design. Here, conversations about sustainability—either the formal ones in sessions or the private, informal ones during refreshment breaks—often start out at a fairly high level.

What's interesting is how those conversations reveal what barriers and attitudes [professionals] face on campuses—and in what areas sustainability efforts are probably going to have significant challenges.

From Scott Carlson on The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Buildings and Grounds Blog":

Montreal — The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill opened a global-education building last year that has helped to ground and unify the various international programs on campus, an administrator told a crowd at the Society for College and University Planning’s annual conference.

UNC has had aspirations for global education, but its international programs and departments were scattered and hidden all over the campus, said Raymond B. Farrow III, the executive director of the university’s Frank Hawkins Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and the former director of development for international studies. The problem became apparent to Mr. Farrow when foreign dignitaries visiting the university had to be shuttled from building to building all day long.

More about SCUP–43 from Elizabeth Redden at Inside Higher Ed:

This year’s Society for College and University Planning conference contained a number of themes: demands for innovative classroom and group study spaces, a need to improve utilization of facilities, rising emphasis on sustainability and energy efficiency, the impact of globalization on Canadian and U.S. campuses, and, in a world of finite and, in some cases, declining resources, a need for smarter strategic planning and budgeting schemes.

But one session Wednesday — the final day of the meeting in Montreal — highlighted the tensions that can arise when some of those themes collide.

The session, entitled “Next Generation Learning Environments: Does One Size Fit All?”, featured an effort to build a 120-seat “theater-in-the-round”-type classroom as part of construction of a new School of Kinesiology and Health Studies Building at Ontario’s Queen’s University.

From Scott Carlson in the Buildings & Grounds Blog:

Montreal — Here at the Society for College and University Planning’s annual conference, designers from Moseley Architects took a close (and, some might argue, courageous) look at the performance of some of the buildings they had designed for Virginia universities under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. The buildings were, for the most part, successes — with some interesting caveats.

Writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Scott Carlson covers a SCUP concurrent session on a topic near and dear to SCUPer hearts. (We'll have a non-protected link shortly.) It was very well-attended:

Defining students merely as "Millennials" is "a handy shorthand for the fact that kids today are different from us," says Ken Steele, senior vice president for education marketing at the Academica Group Inc., a consulting firm. But generalizations about plugged-in students don't get you very far in determining how they choose their colleges.

In a presentation about how prospective students form impressions about colleges, delivered here on Tuesday at the annual conference of the Society for College and University Planning, Mr. Steele proposed a different set of labels for would-be undergraduates: the scholars, the careerists, the conflicted, and the drifters. Those "psychographic clusters" represent students' motivators—either pushed or pulled into college, either to get the college experience or to advance to a career.

G. Rendell liked the session on sustainable master plans. Here are some points he took from it:

• Sustainability requires full-time attention. Each one of these can profit from the full-time effort of at least one person: marketing & communication, energy costs, waste management, best practices, fostering behavioral change.
• Changing behavior requires making expectations clear. Clear expectations (let’s call them “policies") will be necessary for operation of lights, operation of computers, temperature set points, hours of building operation, comprehensive energy usage, comprehensive sustainability targets, utility metering, and a general philosophy of new technology adoption. (More on that last one, later — the rest should be pretty specific.)
• For any construction project, make sure you make your sustainability, energy usage, and LEED certification goals early. Changing your mind, late in the process (even late in the planning phase of the process) costs money.
• Make sure the responsible operating staff have the opportunity to contribute to building design decisions. They can provide a useful reality check.

G. Rendell's take on another session from SCUP–43:

From shared-use sports venues to mixed-use campuses, at least in title.

The session was called “Beyond the Books: Creating Sustainable Mixed-Use College Campuses.” Sounds like the college campus will get used by folks in the community, right?

Well, it turned out to be useful, but not quite what I had anticipated. Subject matter was more about how the college or university can facilitate off-campus development, of which a major beneficiary will be the college or university.

According to Elizabeth Redden:

Mark J. O’Gorman’s presentation stuck out amid the normal conference fare. He wasn’t in town to discuss “successes” or “best practices.” His talk had the word “failure” in the title.

“Whatever scorecard you’re using to talk about sustainability…it’s not good enough,” O’Gorman said Tuesday at the Society for College and University Planning Annual Conference, meeting this week in Montreal. The full title of his session was “Reconciling a Sustainability Failure: Green Planning But No Green Building.”

O’Gorman, an associate professor of political science and environmental studies at Maryville College, in Tennessee, used his college’s example as an avenue into his argument that student demand for sustainable campuses is cresting – to tsunami proportions, to use his metaphor – and, for today’s students, “very good isn’t good enough.”

I attended several sessions over the past two days focused on the millenial generation. What was most interesting were suggestions regarding the the of housing and related student experience this generation of students expects as part of the college experience. Most of us would agree that students arrive on our campuses with different expectations. In addition, we see a different level of involvement by parents of this millenial generation, fondly referred to as helicopter parents, who feel empowered to insert themselves into their children's course registration or roommate selection decisions; or as a colleague of mine once shared, calling our food service operation to suggest we offer their daughter's favorite jam in the dining hall.

Yes, students have changed and our institutions need to change accordingly. I offer these thoughts on what I see may be some fundamental reasons behind the changes we see on our campuses making our tasks as planners ever more challenging.

Jeffrey Arnett suggests that the 18-25 year old cohort defines a new stage in the life-cycle. Emerging adulthood is label for this life stage and it is characterized by five psychological dimensions unique to this age group:

• Identity exploration;
• Instability;
• Self-focused;
• Feeling in-between, and;
  
• Age of possibilities.

The presentations I heard in the last two days focused on housing and educating these millenial students reflect these five dimensions of the development of the emerging adult. Emerging adults struggle with finishing the developmental tasks of adolescence---consolidating a sense of self during a period of instability and self-questioning while sorting through and determining vocational trajectories, personal relationships, and civic responsibilities. Students want their living and learning spaces to support these challenging developmental tasks. At times, they want the seclusion of a private space to reflect on the course of their lives, yet at other times they want convenient semi-public or public spaces to share time with their peers. The challenge for planners is to design living and learning spaces to support the diverse character of the life of the emerging adult. My observations over the last two days confirm that our institutions, with the help of our design and construction colleagues, are seeking creative solutions to the challenges posed by the millenial generation.

Pictured above are the members of SCUP's Southern Regional Council at their meeting on Monday. From left to right: Bob Gunn, Lewis Goodwin (kneeling), Tom Woodward, Tim Fish, Ken Higa (kneeling), Lily Berrios, regional council chair Cynthia Holt (seated wearing her crown), Mary Ann LaFleur, and Gita Hendessi.

SCUP's regions, the management and their relationship to the delivery of products and services, has been a topic of great concern, especially for the past two years. As they have stepped up and created a doubling of regional events—primarily by planning and implementing short, one-day (or less) events in metropolitan areas, they both increase society revenues and create a demand on staff resources. One indicator of the growth of the regions is the fact that in the past year, for the first time ever, more members participated in regional events (when all totaled up) than attended the annual, international conference and idea marketplace.

One thing that has meant for regional leadership is more communication and more meetings. Each region had a regional council meeting in Montreal, as well as a regional meeting for all attendees from each of the five regions. In addition, the five regional councils will meet as a group before the conference ends.