An Earth friendly curriculum

ASEE Prism, Jan 2003 by Creighton, Linda

Green First Impression

The efforts are paying off down at the classroom level, particularly at the year-old course-based program at Virginia Tech where incoming freshmen come face-to-face with their environmental responsibilities as engineers in the opening week of school. All 1,200 impressionable freshmen are summoned to an evening lecture in their first week of classes to hear a featured speaker such as Judge Hullihen Williams Moore, a member of the State Corporation Commission of Virginia and a director of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, highlight their future responsibilities. It's not enough just to tweak things, he told them. As engineers, they must have revolutionary new ideas.

Kampe says the first few weeks of school can be really rough for first-year students. "They all of a sudden wonder, jeez, is engineering what I really want to do? The judge's talk just energizes them. They were going to be engineers, and they were going to fix these problems."

Ironically, the downturn in the economy may adversely affect the funding of programs that could lead to future economic success. Michael Gregg, director of the Green Engineering Project at Virginia Tech's college of engineering, says the "sustainability" of his program concerns him because of a budget crunch in the state of Virginia.

Over the decade of the program's existence, $500,000 has been provided to the school's 10 different degree-producing departments to establish green content in their courses. But the interdisciplinary green engineering program is vulnerable at Virginia Tech because research funding is scarce. "In a research university, faculty live and die based on the research money they bring in;' Gregg says. "The green engineering program is not a cash cow, and it is not self-sustaining."

Virginia Tech has made a lot of progress, he says, toward ensuring that every graduate of the college of engineering has "a healthy understanding of the environmental ramifications of engineering activities." But as a result of budget cutbacks, grants are less available to faculty members teaching green engineering courses.

Gregg says industries are awaiting the arrival of more environmentally aware engineers who can help balance the tough tradeoffs in a worldwide economy. "Companies have responsibilities to their shareholders, to the public, and to the environment, and balancing all those responsibilities is very, very difficult," Gregg says. "If there were any easy answers, they would already have been implemented."

At Virginia Tech, the goal is not to hand graduating engineers all the solutions. As Gregg puts it: "We can't give our students answers to every engineering or ethics question that will arise. But we can give them the tools."

Linda Creighton is a freelance writer based in Arlington, Va. She can be reached at lcreighton@asee.org.