Since I'm here and I'm yappin', let me tell you a little about what has been and will be going on in my life. In the past month, my daughter Natalie, a senior in high school, got all her college application replies and made her decision about where she will go. This fall, she will be enrolling as a freshman at Connecticut College, an excellent and relatively small private college on the coast in New London, Connecticut. She is tentatively interested in environmental science and Conn College is strong in that field. My son Colin, a senior at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, completed his senior thesis in April. He's a double major in film and psychology, and his thesis was a film, mixed live action and animation. His film was selected as the best senior film and he will be graduating with honors on May 27. We have a lot of doors opening and closing around the Theys house in the coming months. Lots of changes and excitement and a lot of tears, too, I'm sure.
Have you ever thought about the monumental task involved in dealing with a campus? Not just on the level of classes, and schedules and housing and food, but in dealing with the enormous energy and materials requirements. Connecticut College operates as what they call an Environmental Model. In 1931, they established a 60-acre arboretum adjacent to the campus. They expanded the arboretum concept to eventually include the campus's entire 750 acres.
They were one of the first colleges to offer a "Human Ecology" major going back to the 60s and they established a campus-wide recycling program around 1970. You can read more about what they've been doing--which is a great deal--here.
At the lunch for admitted students, we sat with the Campus Environmental Coordinator. She talked about the challenges involved in getting people from a wide variety of backgrounds and interests to "buy into" programs that make life a little greener. It seems to me that college is a great time to do this. Students' minds are probably as open as they'll ever be. I'll be watching this closely, because if we can't count on getting students on board, I'm not sure what that says for the future. But in the meantime, we're very pleased that there's such a green college in the family.
