bookreviews


292 College & Research Libraries May 1999 

of them sermons and satires intended to 
press an agenda on a more general audi­
ence than Caesar seems to envision for his 
work. In a land where an astonishingly 
large proportion of the population com­
pletes undergraduate and graduate edu­
cation and where the public cost of main­
taining institutions of higher education is 
considerable, constant debate about the 
goals and direction of these institutions is 
to be expected. Along with more impas­
sioned attempts to influence that direc­
tion, there is place for more modest re­
flections from a thoughtful academic who 
thinks a lot about the implications of the 
rejection letters and memos that many of 
us thoughtlessly toss into the trash (some­
times unread) and who, Ishmael-like, feels 
November in his soul.—George R. Keiser, 
Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas. 

Creighton, Sarah Hammond. Greening the 
Ivory Tower: Improving the Environmen­
tal Track Record of Universities, Colleges, 
and Other Institutions. Cambridge, 
Mass.: MIT Pr., 1998. 337p. $25, alk. pa­
per (ISBN 0262531518). LC 97-39382. 

Many of us who work in universities have 
been attracted by the thought that our 
work consists of doing the right thing 
rather than amassing wealth (the salaries 
of major administrators notwithstanding), 
and we believe our work’s goal is ulti­
mately to increase the health, wisdom, 
and genuine wealth of the larger commu­
nity. Many of us, for similar reasons, have 
committed ourselves to environmental 
amelioration, and have become focused 
on, say, deforestation in tropical wetlands, 
or fossil fuel burning in an upwind state, 
or land development down the road from 
home. 

A concern less apparent to us, however, 
may lie within the academic enclave in 
which we labor. The university is an insti­
tution, and like all physical institutions, it 
impacts the environment. In proportion 
to their size and intensity, our academic 
institutions have negative effects on the 
biosphere, sometimes startlingly huge ef­
fects. Creighton notes that Tufts Univer­
sity uses more electricity than any other 

business served by the region’s electrical 
generating company. When the venerable 
environmentalist Pete Seeger was asked 
recently, “What is the most important 
thing to do for the environment?” his re­
sponse was terse: “Act locally.” Those of 
us in the university—faculty and staff and 
managers—who would act locally in our 
workplace must change an immense 
number of day-to-day technical opera­
tions, a lengthy, tedious process. 

Greening the Ivory Tower is a handbook 
for carrying out that process, and it would 
seem invaluable. Though it includes ex­
periences from a variety of institutions, 
the book is based on work accomplished 
at Tufts University through a research 
program (“Tufts CLEAN!”) begun in 1990 
with a grant from the federal Environ­
mental Protection Agency. The author 
was project manager of Tufts CLEAN! and 
now works in the Massachusetts Division 
of Capital Planning and Operations. Her 
book provides comprehensive informa­
tion for performing what has come to be 
known as an “environmental audit” of a 
university. The first step of an audit is to 
discover quantity and type of resource 
use, along with quantity and type of waste 
generated. These data provide a basis for 
planning reductions and changes in tech­
nologies. After that comes implementing 
the plan for “greening” the campus. 

The audience to which Greening the 
Ivory Tower is addressed, writes Creighton, 
are people who “are interested and moti­
vated to help green their campuses but 
have little or no experience with chang­
ing institutions or with the technologies 
that are needed to accomplish the task.” 
To serve such an audience, the handbook 
must be basic, comprehensive, detailed, 
and accessible. This book meets all of these 
criteria. Although dealing with highly 
technical issues, it systematically presents 
basic information on how universities 
function and how their functioning may 
be changed. The first section of the book 
is a primer on university structure and 
dynamics. The descriptions are peppered 
with insights easily overlooked: the ten­
dency to overgather data coupled with 



Book Reviews 293 

the disinclination for action; the some­
times ephemeral effect of student activ­
ism, as the student body comes and goes; 
the power of top administration to sup­
port or stymie meaningful change. Such 
insights are inevitably accompanied by 
savvy suggestions for facilitating change. 
Subsequent action-oriented chapters, the 
heart of the book, deal with “Buildings & 
Grounds,” “Purchasing,” “Dining Ser­
vices,” “Labs,” and “Academic Depart­
ments.” These provide a veritable cornu­
copia of techniques for reducing con­
sumption and waste. The book’s detailed 
suggestions remind us that changing in­
stitutional behaviors may be difficult. The 
tone might be called “realistic optimism”: 
brisk and encouraging, neither whiny nor 
self-important, always hopeful that some­
thing out of the compendium will work 
for you. 

The closing chapter returns to the over­
all task of “Greening the Ivory Tower.” It 
offers a set of “lessons” learned in the Tufts 
experience. These lessons, like the sugges­
tions for technical change, seem level­
headed and practical. “Environmental 
Stewardship Almost Always Means Re­
ducing Waste” is a lesson that might well 
be posted near your and my department 
photocopier. “Take Action Where You Can 
Be Successful” rings true to anyone who 
has labored as an environmental advocate 
beyond a single issue. “Never Take No for 
an Answer ” indicates a resiliency evi­
denced in this handbook’s wealth of al­
ternatives. 

Despite its length (nearly 300 pages), 
Greening the Ivory Tower should prove ac­
cessible to its audience. It is well orga­
nized, richly documented with graphics 
illustrating its technical recommenda­
tions, charted by a good index, and 
supplemented by an extensive bibliogra­
phy. Most important, it is well written: 
clear and succinct, composed with strong 
topic sentences, clear headers, logical or­
ganization, and few digressions. Those ex­
perienced in environmental advocacy 
might anticipate long, sad, ironic anec­
dotes, but this practical book manages to 
slip them between the lines (the manager 

in charge of watering athletic fields, we 
are told, had perfected a “water cannon” 
technique over many years and was not 
about to change). 

The theme of student involvement is 
the focus of a chapter on “Student Activi­
ties” and, indeed, is interwoven through­
out the book, but the point of view is not 
primarily that of students. A brief, but use­
ful, discussion of curricula outlines the 
need for interdisciplinarity—successfully 
introduced into Tufts ES programs by 
Tony Cortese—and also discusses David 
Orr ’s more basic questions about the goals 
of education. Those interested in peda­
gogy should read Cortese and Orr; those 
interested in changing the institution’s 
business behaviors should order Greening 
the Ivory Tower, display it in the library, and 
recommend it to colleagues. 

When I recently commenced my 
course in environmental advocacy, I 
posed one of those first-day-of-class ques­
tions, one of the few I felt I could answer 
with certainty: “What is the most impor­
tant characteristic of the environmental 
advocate who succeeds over the long 
term?” My answer remains “the one with 
a good heart.” Sarah Hammond 
Creighton’s book has a good heart and 
might lend good heart to its readers.— 
Vernon Owen Grumbling, University of New 
England, Biddeford, Maine. 

The Eighth Off-Campus Library Services Con­
ference Proceedings: Providence, RI, April 
22–24, 1998. Comp. P. Steven Thomas 
and Maryhelen Jones. Mount Pleasant, 
Mich.: Central Michigan Univ., 1998. 
350p. $45. 

The Eighth Off-Campus Library Services Con­
ference Proceedings consists of papers pre­
sented at the conference held in April 
1998. Papers are arranged alphabetically 
by author name, and cover the gamut of 
topics and issues involved with provid­
ing library services to off-campus and dis­
tance-learning students. In addition, this 
volume of proceedings of the Off-Cam­
pus Library Services Conference includes 
the tables of contents for the previous 
seven proceedings. These tables of con­