Building a sustainable campus — from scratch
USC stayed stagnant on sustainability for years. Now it wants to be a leader.
After a year of student-led pressure on the University of Southern California, the school’s Board of Trustees voted to freeze new investments in fossil fuels and work toward divestment over the next few years. They also announced the creation of an advisory committee for future ethical investing.
The story behind the shift goes back to the worldwide climate strikes in Sept. 2019, which also made their way to USC. That event, and the positive reaction it received from newly inaugurated president Carol Folt, inspired what would eventually become DivestSC, a student movement urging the university to divest from fossil fuels.
DivestSC held its own rally in early 2020, gathering dozens of students who were told to call the investment office and demand change. The Academic Senate drafted a resolution sharing the sentiment. Soon after, USC revealed its current fossil fuel holdings, which at that time was $277 million, 5% of its endowment.
After the numbers dropped, DivestSC chair Nathaniel Hyman and his organization continued working behind the scenes, meeting with President Folt, the sustainability office and the chief investment officer to get a firm commitment to divestment. Still, he said DivestSC was met with some apprehension.
“Endowments have a long history, and especially at USC, of being very, very secretive,” Hyman said. “And I think that's been a shift. But, … there's still that hesitant instinct to tell anyone anything, especially students.”
Hyman said he felt like an announcement was going to be made last spring, but the pandemic and the stock market crash might have thrown any plan on the backburner.
The success of the efforts finally came in early February of this year.
“Things don't usually happen that fast at this university,” Hyman said. “So it was really good to hear that they had acted fairly quickly, and fairly comprehensively,”
The feeling of surprise and relief was echoed by all of the environmental student leaders I spoke with about the University’s new commitment to sustainability. Current and former students said sustainability was a hard conversation to have at USC under the previous administration of Max Nikias, but they’re genuinely hopeful about the promises President Folt has made.
The Starting Line
To understand where USC is trying to go, it’s helpful to first see where the university stands in regards to sustainability. The university breaks its goals into seven sections: energy, water, transportation, waste, procurement, education and engagement. These sections are outlined in the 2020 sustainability plan, which was prepared by former sustainability programs manager Halli Bovia. The interactive below shows an overview of the major projects USC has undertaken to date regarding sustainability.
In sum, the university surpassed its sustainability goals in energy use reduction and sustainable food purchasing.
However, there have been notable failures. USC did not meet its water use reduction goal, its waste reduction goal, or its responsible purchasing goal. Additionally, several categories of the 2020 plan (such as transportation) did not put forward any metric to measure success other than "reduction", so those goal completions should be taken with a grain of salt.
The Track Record
Of the progress USC has made toward its sustainability goals, much of it has come in just the last few years. A 2017 analysis from USC's Academic Senate Sustainability Committee found the university "lagging behind many of our peer institutions."
Both nearby universities such as UCLA, as well as other private universities such as Stanford track their sustainability metrics through the STARS system, a service of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, or AASHE. According to the Senate's analysis, USC collected data in 2012 to report to STARS, but when its performance would have placed them in the "Bronze" tier, the second lowest above simply "Reporter," the university decided not to report to AASHE.
The Senate report compared USC's 2012 recorded data to 21 peer institutions' data from 2014. The Senate found USC had the lowest score for overall sustainability and sustainability education. USC was also in the lower rungs for energy, dining and procurement, and in the middle of the pack for water, waste and transportation. It's worth noting that the data compared different years, as USC hasn't recorded the same kind of numbers since.
To remedy the university's ills, the Academic Senate prescribed a new sustainability structure, one where a sustainability council would be on the same level as other high-level administration officials. Compared to the 2017 analysis, the university has made significant progress toward their 2020 goals in the last couple of years. Still, student leaders and sustainability faculty said it's been a delayed start.
"Not Allowed to Rock the Boat"
Claire Mauss joined the Environmental Student Assembly (ESA) as a freshman in 2016. As a new ambassador, the designation given to most freshmen, Mauss said her advocacy director told her early on that ESA was not allowed to make waves. This was apparently because they were funded by the student government, which was funded by the university itself and "people don't like sustainability on this campus," Mauss quoted the advocacy director telling her.
Instead, ESA was supposed to do individual, educational events -- handing out stickers to remind people to save water, or putting on visual displays about the environmental impact of eating meat -- but it was not supposed to organize larger sustainability projects or put pressure on the school.
The practice wasn't written down anywhere, but Mauss said it was an attitude that ESA directors followed. She said she got a similar feeling from faculty and staff too -- even the people that cared a lot about sustainability didn't want to rock the boat with Nikias, as it felt sort of like a "dead end."
"When we would send any sort of proposal or request to Nikias, it was an immediate no," Mauss said. "No, we cannot meet with him. No, we cannot talk to him. No, we're not going to consider their proposals."
When Mauss became assistant director herself, she said she began to debunk the myth that ESA couldn't take real action with student government funding, and she found out that no one there actually cared how the funding was used. She restructured ESA, and decided directors in ESA should lead year-long measurable projects.
Tianna Shaw-Wakeman, the co-founder of DivestSC and former director of student group Environmental Core, shared the frustrations over Nikias's approach to sustainability.
"USC was just so siloed," Shaw-Wakeman said. "So even if there were amazing initiatives -- student gardens happening over here and transportation and things changing to the left -- it's not all working towards a cohesive singular vision."
Shaw-Wakeman said that the Nikias administration was principally focused on making USC a world-class academic and research institution, and she doesn't think it was interested in pursuing sustainability because the university was already behind. In other words, if USC couldn't be a leader in the space, it wasn't interested in entering it at all.
"If we get a couple recycling bins, the story is 'USC is behind and gets some recycling bins,' it's not 'USC pushes ahead," Shaw-Wakeman said.
When Shaw-Wakeman started at USC, the sustainability office was just one person: Halli Bovia. When asked about the relationship between the sustainability office and the Nikias administration, Bovia said the relationship wasn't antagonistic -- rather, it was nonexistent.
"He was not interested in getting into an 'arms race' for sustainability, where you're just trying to out sustainability other universities," Bovia said. "So that was never really on the table."
Bovia said it was about slowly moving the needle when it came to sustainability at USC, and building relationships with people rather than causing any problems. The sustainability committee was located within the same division at USC that oversaw the department of public safety. As a result, public safety crises sometimes overshadowed the work Bovia was doing.
She left in 2017 and her sort-of replacement, Ellen Dux, wasn't hired until 2018. This meant that for Claire Mauss's and Tianna Shaw-Wakeman's sophomore year, no one in the USC administration was working toward sustainability goals, which were fast-approaching in 2020.
Bovia said the goals outlined in the plan were supposed to be ambitious, but achievable. She emphasized that it's not anyone's fault, but she is disappointed that the goals were not fully met after her departure.
