Imagine the surprise of a student who comes to Washington, pays over $150,000 for an education, graduates with honors, and leaves the university only to find that among the faculty from whom she learned, there remain supporters of fallacious reasoning and archaic ideas. In an appalling Op-Ed piece appearing in Monday's Eagle ("AU's 'Green Teaching' Certificate Promotes Bias"), Professor Rossiter shows his lack of understanding of the Green Teaching Certification, calls the environmental movement simply a "particular conclusion about the tradeoff between the environment and the economy," and ignores that climate change has been significantly linked to human-induced greenhouse gas emissions by an international panel of Nobel Prize-winning scientists (www.ipcc.ch).
Prof. Rossiter's piece exhibits his ignorance in regard to the Green Teaching Certification program, which promotes an incentive based approach to combating environmental degradation in the classroom. While the checklist for Green Teaching Certification contains 46 specifically mentioned points, professors are required to comply with only 20 of these points to achieve the highest certification under the program, and are also welcome to create their own elements (www.american.edu/academic.depts/provost/teachingcenter/greenteaching/index.html).
Rossiter takes specific offense at only two of these suggestions: that professors should require certain procedures (like printing double-sided, or submitting work via e-mail) and encourage political action, saying that professors are "not hired to tell students what to think, but to teach them how to think for themselves." In truth, professors are employed to teach students to evaluate relevant facts and emerging research, to create their own conclusions and to consider the legacy they leave as AU students, as stated in the school's "Ideas into Action, Action into Service" initiative. Even if Rossiter's alleged "tradeoff" were an accurate description of the opportunities our country has to reduce and mitigate climate change, protecting the environment by reducing consumption, waste and pollution would still be an ethically sound idea for professors to promote in their classes and for students to explore politically. After all, AU is the most politically active campus in the nation, according to The Princeton Review. "Tradeoff," however, represents an antiquated view of environmental issues, especially as companies increasingly combine money-making endeavors with progressive social initiatives in the newly emerging "fourth sector" (See NYT, "Make Money, Save the World," query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E1D9113EF935A35756C0A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink).
As U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon calls urgently on President Obama and leaders of other top industrialized nations to collaborate on international climate change agreements (See Washington Post, "U.N. Chief Wants Obama at Climate-Change Summit," Feb. 10, 2009), we have the opportunity here at AU to reduce our own ecological footprint and to become a more sustainable community by encouraging a brand of supportive, high quality teaching through the Green Teaching Certification program. Eco-Sense invites Rossiter and others interested in how to live responsibly in their environment to a Campus Sustainability Panel, at 7 p.m. on Feb. 19 in the Battelle-Tompkins Atrium.
Rose Davis Senior, College of Arts and Sciences
