Higher Learning Adapts To a Greening Attitude

Washington Post ^ | 22 June 2008 | By Susan Kinzie

[shrinkermd]

The environmental fervor sweeping college campuses has reached beyond the push to recycle plastics and offer organic food and is transforming the curriculum, permeating classrooms, academic majors and expensive new research institutes.

The University of Maryland teaches "green" real estate strategies for landscape architects. The University of Virginia's business graduate students recently created a way to generate power in rural Indian villages with discarded rice husks. And in a Catholic University architecture studio last week, students displayed ideas for homes made from discarded shipping containers.

"It should be part of everything we do," said Ligia Johnson, a Catholic student whose plan for the Kenilworth neighborhood in Northeast Washington included roofs that collect rainwater and grow plants and trees.

What was once a fringe interest, perhaps seemingly a fad, has become fully entrenched in academic life, university officials say, affecting not just how students live but what they learn and, as graduates, how they will change workplaces and neighborhoods.

[shrinkermd]

For those lumpen proletariat on FR, it is important to note the author claims this is a demand from the students and includes radical views on climate change.

Parents are paying $40,000 or more to attend these pricey, private colleges and universities. I wonder if they realize what is actually being taught.

Environmentalism is part of the secular religion of liberalism. It provides meaning and purpose for those empty of meaning and purpose.

[Kay Ludlow]

This is hippy professors on tenure, who are feeling free to do anything in their later years. They are teaching the exact same “values” they tried to press on society back when they were living in communes.

[narses]

See http://www.uoregon.edu/~hutchlab/greenchem/

[steelyourfaith]

From the link:
"For those who are skeptical about global warming and think that the current trend is often too alarmist, the changes carry risk. "It discredits science," said Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT. "It's propaganda," he added, with opposing viewpoints rarely explored. "

~~SNIP~~

"But many school officials say there's a growing consensus about climate change. "Three or four years ago, I would hear that from people, that global warming's a fraud," said Randall Ott, architecture dean at Catholic. "I don't hear that at all now," especially from students. In his view, he said, 'the evidence is overwhelming -- and very troubling. We at our university feel a certain ethical mission to be operative on this issue.' "

Brilliant. Dr. Architecture Dean cites student hearsay as the basis of his opinion that Anthropogenic Global Warming ™ exists. Talk about the blind leading the blind.

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[Kay Ludlow]

Green Chemistry? LOL! Luckily, their media page shows that they haven’t gotten much media attention since 2005.

[Beowulf]

Brilliant. Dr. Architecture Dean cites student hearsay as the basis of his opinion that Anthropogenic Global Warming ™ exists. Talk about the blind leading the blind.

LOL. Education is America is a disgrace. As it disengages itself from its historic objective to teach the truth and explore differing ideas it has become prohibitively expensive (many multiples greater than the Consumer Price Index), while at the same time embracing Marxism, anti-capitalism, dhimmitude and anti-Westernism.

[ferv888]

In Africa, the LDS Church has devised a merry-go-round that when the children are on supplies the energy to run the well to the village, low tech, but it does the job.

FERV888

[SierraWasp]

"secular religion"

Actually, it is more insidious than that. It is the resurrection of pathetic Paganism! Haven't you seen the bumpersticker on the BMW's, Mercedes and Hybrids that read:"BORN AGAIN PAGAN!", I have!!!

We really do have a serious problem in America with the "seperation of church and state!" GovernMental EnvironMentalists are surely born again Pagans!!!

Their prime directive and mission is to make everything prohibitively costly till they trash America's economy!!!

[ProtectOurFreedom]

And then the playground monitors stand guard with whips and guns to force the kiddies to “play” on the merry-go-round? Somehow exploitation of child playtime to pump water seems morally bankrupt. If the continent of Africa wasn’t governed by tinpot dictators who threw out the colonials, it could have a thriving economy where you wouldn’t have to abuse the poor children.

I’m sorry, this “solution” just seems emblematic of all that is wrong with Africa.

[Calvin Locke]

There was a lot of exposure to this stuff in the early 1990s in b-school.

My problem with greenies is that they always have some mythical utopia that increases the cost of entry as well as minimizing any progress in product development.

But, on the disposable of hazardous waste, one prof told of a failed batch of product at a food company was considered "hazardous" waste.

My guess was that he was referring to "Cool Whip" at a General Foods plant.

[Grampa Dave]

This green bs posing as science has been around for about 3 decades in our grade schools, junior highs, high schools, community colleges and so called elite universities.

In the last decade it has become a rabid religious sect in the democrat religion which replaced Christianity.

The left wing green ecoterrorist professors with tenure can say anything to push their rabid green religion and have no fear of being fired. If their students dare to question them, they will suffer.