Colgate University
AC-1: Academic Courses

For Academic Year 2019-2020, the Office of Sustainability worked with the Registrar's Office, the Office of Institutional Research, and IT to establish a new process for determining which courses are Sustainability Focused (SF) or Sustainability Inclusive (SI), using AASHE's guidance for both criteria.

First, working with the Registrar's Office and the Office of Institutional Research, we received a comprehensive listing of every course offered during the academic year along with the faculty member who taught that course. A total of 994 courses were identified.

Office of Sustainability interns then went through the course titles and descriptions and labeled the courses as SF, SI, or "Not related to sustainability". This was the most time-consuming and labor-intensive part of this process.

Working with IT, we then generated an email that went to every single faculty member on campus specifically addressed to them. The email contained the courses they taught and our initial categorization of each. In the email, we then asked each faculty member to review our categorization and let us know if we miscategorized anything. We told faculty members that they did not have to respond if we categorized each of their courses correctly. We received 148 responses from faculty members and 44 of them let us know that we miscategorized one or more of their classes. Of the 44 faculty members who responded, we downgraded a total of 21 classes from SF or SI to "Not related to sustainability" based on their feedback. The other courses we miscategorized were either upgraded from SI to SF (4 total courses) or downgraded from SF to SI (31 total classes). Making the extra effort to reach out to each individual faculty member with their courses listed, helped us to better engage faculty members in this process. Doing this was an important outcome.

Altogether, this single credit was the most time-consuming aspect of the entire STARS framework.

Courses with multiple offerings or sections were counted as one course.

There are several independent studies and theses within the Environmental Studies Program as well as in Geography, Biology, and Chemistry. Colgate also offers sustainability workshops that are in collaboration with physical education. Each independent study has been focused directly on issues of sustainability including local food access, water quality, agricultural impacts of climate change, etc.