Sustainability QEP Makes Sense

Change has rapidly begun to devour EMU’s campus one bite at a time. One new program, with plans for implementation in 2010, is the required Southern Association of Colleges Quality Enhancement Project, or QEP. This program will quantifiably measure an enhancement program over a five year span and is a requirement for reaccreditation. EMU is required to pick a project on campus that will most likely absorb the universities resources and measure how that program has enhanced the school over a five year span.

Recommendations for possible campus projects have been presented and eventually narrowed down to three prominent ideas for student body discussion. The QEP meeting happened in Common Grounds with a total audience of no more than thirty—including the presenters and the staff of the coffee shop. The basic ideas are the creation of a new Center for Teaching and Learning, sustainability through green living, and Residence Hall learning communities.

The Center for Teaching and Learning would serve as a “Common Grounds 2” that would be in some pre-existing place on campus and would teach teachers to teach better—say that ten times fast—and allow for a space for students to have access to resources as well as dialogue with their teachers.

Sustainability serves to use green technology to promote a new kind of lifestyle through an efficient, clean, respectful, and simple campus that is environmentally beneficial.

Residence Hall learning communities currently stands as an immersive, theme-oriented community living style that would share common interests among people who live together to create a more learning-stimulated experience outside of classes.

As these projects have not been ironed out yet in terms of plausibility, cost, quantification, and actual realistic possibility, it is challenging to judge which of these would best serve the school. Sustainability, however, is appealing and simple to quantify. With the current trend on campus for the new science center to be green, all arrows have begun to point in the direction of green living. Not only is the Shenandoah Valley a beautiful spectacle that singlehandedly redeems the East Coast of uglier places like the murky swamps of Florida, the frozen hills of Maine, and all of New Jersey, but it is also the source of much culture and history. The Valley needs to be protected through green living and, upon this recognition, many efforts have already been made to help defend it.

EMU has a chance to stand as a glorious standard for environmental love, unlike the dirty, plague-ridden JMU muck balls. I’m sure they are not all dirty little muck balls, but EMU has a chance to protect simplicity, beauty, non-conformity, and love for the creation God gave us. Sustainability is also easily measured in the idea that EMU already does measure the amount of recycling, energy use, and waste on campus while simultaneously taking pride in the fact that EMU already uses half the amount of average energy used by other campuses. Green living not only serves as a tribute to our environment but also follows within the guidelines of EMU’s mission statement, simple to begin and almost unlimited in potential.

The QEP could allow EMU to set an amazing new dynamic for the school, one of respect to the Earth, anti-consumerism, and devotion to healthy living, all of which serve to increase the already diverse ideals that make EMU such an individual and phenomenal campus.