The PresRelease is my own little page where I can share items of interest, celebration, or concern with my University colleagues. It's my hope to update things here every few days. If you’d like to get in touch with me, I invite you to email me at this address: president@uconn.edu. I might use one of your emails for a future posting.

Michael J. Hogan
President

It's not easy being green - but we're improving.

UConn has improved its rating from a year ago and is now listed as a “Campus Sustainability Leader” in the 2008-09 Green Report Card, which was released last week by the Sustainable Endowments Institute.  If you go to the link, type in ‘Connecticut’ in the search box.  Our overall grade went from a C last year to a B this year.

Only eight state public universities in the nation were rated higher than UConn and 12 others received the same overall rating, including several of our “aspirational” peers: Cal-Berkeley, UVA, Wisconsin-Madison and Michigan.

This is the Sustainable Endowments Institute’s third edition of the College Sustainability Report Card, which examines campus and endowment sustainability policies at 300 colleges and universities in the United States and in Canada. According to SEI, “[t]he aim is to provide accessible information so that schools may learn from each other’s experiences, thereby fostering more effective sustainability policies. The report assesses 43 indicators, from green building initiatives to recycling programs to endowment investment policies, and uses an A to F letter-grading system to evaluate performance.”
Here’s the link to SEI’s report card for all 300 college and universities.

And thanks to UConn’s Director of Environmental Policy Rich Miller for this info.