News from the Front of Sustainable University Campuses

Book excerpt: Once upon a time, more specifically during medieval time, universities were meant to be the places for teaching and shaping the elite administrators’ class of the regnant in charge. With the industrial revolution, professors were asked to improve the efficiency of the machines and the new production systems. During the Second World War, academia was the tool fostering technological innovation. In recent times, Richard Florida outlined a new University role in nurturing the rampant “creative class”, while John Scott recalled the needed postmodern shift of the university missions from teaching to research as a tool for public service mission, and Henry Etzkowitz designed a triple helix cluster which should blend the boundaries between university—industry—government. In this global competition and increasing pressures, the front is populated by some of the universities reported in this book. Visions, strategies, policies and action plans, brave management programmes, new interdisciplinary and cross-cutting committees, bottom-up governance structures and green teams, advanced IT system for energy management, are some of the strategies here reported from the front. While pursuing the emerging “third mission”, all initiatives described in the chapters also reveal a common, underlying, higher aspiration – to untangle and test how universities can help the localities and societies in which they stand to transition towards carbon neutrality, societal sustainability and resilience to climate change.