Prerequisites Part 2: Continuing Education

Posted on June 20, 2023 by climatechangefork

(Source: Education Corner)

Last week’s blog ended with the following two short paragraphs:

Mid-career or career-shift education seems to be the right remedy for acquiring job-relevant knowledge of the fast-changing reality. Adult education is being offered now in many colleges. I will expand on this issue in my next blog.

I’m not sure that everyone needs to go back to school but we do need to take care of dangerous gaps in our knowledge as they affect our decisions, especially when those decisions can have such an enormous impact. I will discuss this more in next week’s blog.

This blog will try to put some content behind these statements.

A broader introduction to continuing education is cited below:

Continuing Education is a form of education that most professionals need to pursue after their formal education to have the most updated knowledge in their field of expertise. There are many mediums and methods for such programs; they would vary from one-time classes, conferences, online courses, and post-degree programs.

Although not all professions require this continuous learning, most specialized careers do. For example, in the medical field, doctors need to continually study and learn new and advanced methods for treating their patients. Health care specialists need to stay current in improving the welfare of everyone. The same thing applies to lawyers, politicians, scientists, professors, and many more experts.

This will prepare you to handle new responsibilities and create better opportunities too. With the continually changing of the globalized society, continuing education will be more commonplace shortly. Even notable people and people in business around the world are advocates of it.

Learning is a lifetime process, so make the most of it by taking advantage of the different sources and platforms for continuing education.

The key relevant sentence in that quote is the last one, particularly in an environment in which reality changes are accelerating at the rate that we are observing.

An earlier blog that was focused on the forecasted population decline (March 7, 2023) showed a global map comparing changes in the 65+ age group, between 2015 and 2050. It indicated a major increase in elderly people. I focused specifically on the developed world, where this shift is accompanied by major increases in social spending on this segment of the population. A more recent accounting goes even further, predicting a decline toward 6 billion by the end of the century (from about 10 billion at the peak around the mid-20th century) with a commensurate accelerated increase in the proportion of the elderly. These newer data indicate that the largest 15 countries by GDP all have fertility rates below replacement (this includes India and China) and that globally we are quickly approaching replacement.

I am 84 years old. My wife is younger but not by much. We both have tenure at the same school, and have decided not to retire as long as we can be effective, both in our teaching and service to our institution. Throughout our long academic careers, we have also had the opportunity to take sabbatical breaks, during which we were able to observe the accelerated changes in the reality that surrounds both our professional and private lives. This practice is not unique to our institution; it runs across much of the academic world.

I have mentioned earlier that I have family in France, with whom we are trying to maintain as much contact as we possibly can (see the December 18, 2018 blog, in the context of the Yellow Vests demonstrations). One of the family members, a physician by profession, visited us a few months ago, with her immediate family. She stayed for a week and enjoyed the experience. I asked why she couldn’t stay longer, and she answered that she had to return to work to take over a temporary managerial position. I asked her to consider taking a sabbatical in NYC so we could spend more time together. She didn’t know what I was talking about, and I realized immediately how unique academic situations are. I tried to Google to find out which companies offer a paid sabbatical to their employees and I got a list that looked more like opportunities for extended vacations. They are nice but they are not academic sabbaticals.

I am fully aware that most people go through life without the benefits of higher education. This is particularly true in developing countries, but it is also true in rich countries. The numbers are shown in Figure 1. The bigger issue is primary education and not higher or continuing education (for many, it comes down to gender equity more than the availability of educational institutions).

However, the issues of equity in educational availability and the availability of continuing education are different. In today’s environment, attaining higher education in some form is not a prerequisite for understanding changing environments. It is, however, a tool required to successfully adapt to the changing environment and be able to make a living. There is a difference.

Figure 1 (Source: UNESCO Institute of Statistics via World Resources Simulation Center)

At least in developed countries, and many developing countries, the infrastructure for higher education exists. The infrastructure for continuing education also exists but is a bit chaotic. Higher education is focused on degree programs: you register for a degree, the school states the requirements for the degree, and you follow them. Usually, the degree programs are divided into departments, each of which administers the degree in its particular areas. In principle, most of the courses that are available for degree programs are also available for general education. However, many of the courses (especially in the sciences) are vertical, meaning there are prerequisites for taking them. For a degree program, the responsible departments will set out a degree map, which ensures that you will meet the prerequisites. If you just enroll in a course, paying no attention to the prerequisites, chances are that you will be completely unprepared and will drop out of the course, wasting your time and money.

Back to the first of the two sentences I quoted at the beginning, from last week’s blog:

One of the best ways that is presently being employed to ascertain that job holders follow the changing realities and the progress in their specific areas is to require a license for practitioners. We are used to licenses that give us permission to do stuff, such as drivers’ licenses, passports, and identity cards. Many of the licenses come with expiration dates that require passing some tests before renewals. In the US, most of the licenses are issued by states. From personal experience, growing up and being educated in Israel, many of my friends who attended medical schools took the American exams to practice medicine in some US states as a matter of routine. The rationale was that the demanding tests should not be a problem immediately after finishing medical school but might present a bigger challenge after a year or two out of school.

Business News Daily has a list of professions that require a license:

You already know you need a license to become a truck driver, but did you know that nearly 1 in 4 occupations in the U.S. now require a license? According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 23% of full-time workers have a license or certification.

Requirements for renewals can be demonstrated by the following regulation in Texas:

Continuing professional education (CPE) is required to renew a standard certificate. Your certificate will be set to inactive status if you do not renew by the expiration date. CPE hours are required, even if your certificate has already been set to inactive status. Certificates cannot be renewed by completing examinations. 

  • Classroom teachers must complete 150 CPE hours.
    • No more than 150 CPE hours are required, even if you hold multiple classroom certificate areas.
  • If you hold an administrative and/or student services certificate you must complete 200 CPE hours.sw
  • No more than 200 CPE hours are required, even if you hold multiple certificates, such as: classroom, administrative and student services certificates.

General CPE information is located on the Continuing Professional Education Information page, along with renewal FAQs.

I added the emphasis on the non-exam requirements to show that there are other ways to measure continued learning within a field.

License requirements are not based on the “noble” wish that we stay up-to-date in our professions. In many cases, the practice is also strongly motivated by the not-so-noble desire to limit competition in the profession. I reserve this issue for a separate discussion.

Should we require a license before approving a US supreme court judge or mandate renewal requirements? I don’t think so! There are effective alternatives. In the case of the US Supreme Court, the chief justice could try to periodically (once every five years?) sort the cases in front of the court into a semi-disciplinary data collection and (politely) ask  every judge to be the point man/woman in that area. It would be at the judge’s discretion to determine if he/she needed additional education in his/her area. That judge would not have different voting powers in his/her areas of specialty, but he/she would be asked to update fellow judges on the latest developments in that particular field.

For higher education institutions, it would be both convenient and doable to expand existing educational structures to include certification demands. In today’s environment, this is already done in schools of education in universities.

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Prerequisites for Supreme Court Judges

Posted on June 13, 2023 by climatechangefork


(Source: MarcusObal on Wikimedia)

“Playing with fire” is an idiom that has become popular on more than one level. Cambridge Dictionary describes it as “to act in a way that is very dangerous and to take risks.” I am writing this blog in NYC, which is currently (hopefully for only a short time), the most polluted big city in the world, due to a weather system driving the smog from major wildfires in Eastern Canada in our direction. One can combine this idiom with reality in many major environmental indicators. To demonstrate the issue and offer a possible solution, I will start with the US Supreme Court. About two weeks ago, the Supreme Court announced an important, unanimous environmental decision, the essence of which is summarized in the New York Times article below:

After half a century of painstaking restoration under the Clean Water Act, streams and wetlands nationwide are once again at risk of contamination by pollution and outright destruction as a result of a ruling on Thursday by the Supreme Court.

The Environmental Protection Agency has long interpreted the Clean Water Act as protecting most of the nation’s wetlands from pollution. But now the court has significantly limited the reach of the law, concluding that it precludes the agency from regulating discharges of pollution into wetlands unless they have “a continuous surface connection” to bodies of water that, using “ordinary parlance,” the court described as streams, oceans, rivers and lakes.

At least half of the nation’s wetlands could lose protection under this ruling, which provides an even narrower definition of “protected waters” than the Trump administration had sought.

The full ruling is posted on the court’s webpage.

I want to emphasize that although the ruling was unanimous, it came with four separate justifications, each of which will probably have a strong impact in terms of the future authority of the EPA or, more broadly will put such authority to the test again in a not-so-distant future. Below is the essence of Justice Kavanaugh’s separate reasoning (to which the three liberal justices joined). He agreed with the ruling but was troubled about the potential ramifications:

I write separately because I respectfully disagree with the Court’s new test for assessing when wetlands are covered by the Clean Water Act. The Court concludes that wetlands are covered by the Act only when the wetlands have a “continuous surface connection” to waters of the United States—that is, when the wetlands are “adjoining” covered waters. Ante, at 20, 22 (internal quotation marks omitted). In my view, the Court’s “continuous surface connection” test departs from the statutory text, from 45 years of consistent agency practice, and from this Court’s precedents. The Court’s test narrows the Clean Water Act’s coverage of “adjacent” wetlands to mean only “adjoining” wetlands. But “adjacent” and “adjoining” have distinct meanings: Adjoining wetlands are contiguous to or bordering a covered water, whereas adjacent wetlands include both (i) those wetlands contiguous to or bordering a covered water, and (ii) wetlands separated from a covered water only by a man-made dike or barrier, natural river berm, beach dune, or the like. By narrowing the Act’s coverage of wetlands to only adjoining wetlands, the Court’s new test will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States. Therefore, I respectfully concur only in the Court’s judgment.

In different words, Justice Kavanaugh is accusing some of his colleagues of being ignorant about basic environmental workings, like the interconnections of the global water cycle. To put it more broadly, he accuses other justices of playing with fire when it comes to our environmental well-being.

The last few blogs (starting on April 25th, with the Earth Day blog) focused on colleges’ attempts to include the accelerating global realities that will affect students throughout their lifetimes into the official strategic plans. I indicated that faculty can be prepared for such instruction only through conducting and/or following timely research. Most of these reality changes are anthropogenic. They break the traditional separations of physical and social sciences. It is not surprising that the impact of these changing realities doesn’t stop at the gates of universities but has spread to affect all of us and everything we do, including the role of supreme court judges.

This is starting to come to life in another decision, still pending before the Supreme Court, regarding the admission criteria that colleges and universities are allowed to use. David Brooks makes an interesting point in his op-ed, suggesting that race-based affirmative action be replaced by a class-based equivalent:

We now have whole industries that take attendance at an elite school as a marker of whether they should hire you or not. So the hierarchies built by the admissions committees get replicated across society. America has become a nation in which the elite educated few marry each other, send their kids to the same exclusive schools, move to the same wealthy neighborhoods and pass down disproportionate economic and cultural power from generation to generation — the meritocratic Brahmin class.

And, as Michael Sandel of Harvard has argued, the meritocratic culture gives the “winners” the illusion that this sorting mechanism is righteous and inevitable and that they’ve earned everything they’ve got.

And then we sit around wondering why Trumpian populists revolt.

Worse, this system is built on a definition of “merit” that is utterly bonkers. In what sane world do we sort people — often for life — based on their ability to be teacher-pleasers from age 15 to 18?

The last sentence in the citation can be rewritten: In what sane world do we ask people to perform any job — often for life — based on their ability to be teacher-pleasers from age 15 to 18?

There should be prerequisites for judging environmental issues. We need to redirect, to fill skill deficiencies regardless of age. This is obviously not limited to environmental issues, nor to issues that require a solid science education (STEM). Recently, such a need emerged in another majority decision accusing Andy Warhol of stepping on copyright requirements. Again, it looks like only one minority opinion (Justice Elena Kagan) knew what she was talking about.

Mid-career or career-shift education seems to be the right remedy for acquiring job-relevant knowledge of the fast-changing reality. Adult education is being offered now in many colleges. I will expand on this issue in my next blog.

One good example of how this works is the accelerating emergence of Artificial Intelligence (see ChatGPT) in our everyday life and the emerging realization of the need for government regulations to limit misuse and prevent disasters. A few months ago, one member of Congress recognized the need for more information and took the appropriate step to increase his knowledge of the issue:

For Northern Virginia Congressman Don Beyer, it’s never too late to go back to school. At 72 years old, Beyer — who represents Arlington, Alexandria City, Falls Church and parts of Fairfax County — is a part-time student at George Mason University.

“I’m pursuing a graduate degree in computer science with emphasis on machine learning, and according to George Mason University, that’s the closest to quote unquote artificial intelligence,” said Beyer, a 1972 graduate of Williams College in Massachusetts.

I’m not sure that everyone needs to go back to school but we do need to take care of dangerous gaps in our knowledge as they affect our decisions, especially when those decisions can have such an enormous impact. I will discuss this more in next week’s blog.

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Incorporating Changing Reality into College Strategic Plans: Part 6: The Many Ways

Posted on June 6, 2023 by climatechangefork

Senator Schumer coordinated what was probably the most consequential senate resolution in his tenure as majority leader, close to midnight on Thursday (June 1st). Even so, he was able to show up Friday morning at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, to celebrate Brooklyn College’s 2023 graduate commencement. I was impressed.

I have been teaching at Brooklyn College since 1979 (44 Years). In that stretch of time, I have attended many commencements. As far back as I can remember, Senator Schumer has attended. His agreement to honor Brooklyn College graduates probably anchors on the special relationship that his wife, Iris Weinshall, has with the college. She graduated from the College and also served as Vice-Chancellor of CUNY.

Senator Schumer’s attendance at this year’s commencement was probably the most impressive. True, each time, he has told the same story about the choice that he made between taking a trip around the world after his graduation or staying with his new girlfriend. Among older faculty that has heard this story many times, this has become a sort of joke. This year’s graduates, however, heard it for the first time. For them, it was new: a message that now they will have to live with the choices that they make—some of which will be consequential—so they better think hard before they make them.

This commencement also distinguished itself with an address by a former faculty member Tania León (Brooklyn College, Wikipedia). In addition to numerous accolades (coupled with an honorary doctorate), she received an additional distinction, presented by another notable Brooklyn College graduate, Leonard Tow. He announced the establishment of a new distinguished teaching position at the Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music, which will be named in her honor. Another prominent Brooklyn College graduate, Jumaane Williams, is now the Public Advocate for NYC. He advised graduates that failures are good and that they should learn how to handle them. A lack of failures indicates that we aren’t experimenting and thus will also miss successes.

Since my Earth Day blog (April 25th), I have focused on ways to incorporate accelerated changes in global reality into college curricula, emphasizing my own school and university. Major components in all the changing realities are of our own making (anthropogenic). Adaptation and mitigation to these changes will be necessary over the lifetimes of our students and their immediate families. I have emphasized that most of the curricular and research changes that we need to introduce to accomplish these important issues are new both for the students and for faculty, meaning that serious research is needed to find our way through it.

One way to address it is to directly involve students in the changes that the college already has to go through. This practice has been labeled “Campus as a Lab” and I described it repeatedly in an earlier series of blogs (July 19 – October 4, 2022). As classes ended this semester and exams started, the faculty at Brooklyn College organized a Faculty Day to discuss our work and issues in various fields. One symposium that day was a demonstration of various applications of the concept. I presented some of the material I have described in the blogs, focusing on the energy transition. Two other faculty members presented different possible applications:

Prof. Jolanta Kruszelnicka from the Health and Nutrition Sciences Department talked about green building and health, with a real example of how to involve students with the sustainability requirements of new building construction on campus. Meanwhile, Prof. Brett F. Branco from the Earth and Environmental Sciences Departments discussed the role that centers can play in addressing parts of the reality we all live in. Prof. Branco is also the director of the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay:

The Institute is a partnership among the National Park Service, the City of New York, and the City University of New York (CUNY) acting on behalf of a Consortium of seven other research institutions: Columbia University, Cornell University, Rutgers University, Stony Brook University, New York Sea Grant, Stevens Institute of Technology, and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Our mission is to produce integrated knowledge that increases biodiversity, well-being, and adaptive capacity in coastal communities and waters surrounding Jamaica Bay and New York City.

Almost all universities with an active research program create research centers in various relevant topics for which funding is available. As I discussed in an earlier blog, one center that is directly mentioned in the current Brooklyn College Strategic Plan is the Cancer Institute. These research centers actively involve students on various levels and collaborating faculty from various disciplines.

Another productive way to directly involve students in current reality is to try to get them involved with the surrounding community. At Brooklyn College, one productive example is the creation of the Brooklyn College Community Partnership:

The Brooklyn College Community Partnership (BCCP) is a youth development program bridging Brooklyn College to the broader Brooklyn community through initiatives in public middle and high schools and at our Brooklyn College Arts Lab (BCAL). As a youth-centered organization with a long history of community engagement and empowerment, we invite our students to bring their histories, knowledge, and expertise to the learning process. Through our unique relationship with Brooklyn College, we further connect youth to the College campus by leveraging our resources at BCAL, which includes a STEM lab, 2 music studios, a performance stage, and a fashion design lab.

In addition to serving the purpose of directly involving students and faculty in current affairs, this partnership offers a productive opportunity to recruit students to attend the college, a pressing issue these days for many schools.

An alternative to achieve similar objectives with a different audience is to create an Energy Park on the college campus (see the March 24, 2021 blog). Exhibits for the park can be solicited from relevant startups in the neighborhood and research products from college faculty and students.

This concept can be extended beyond energy to a “future park.”

With commencement behind us for this year, this will be the last blog in which I focus on how to incorporate changing realities into the strategic plans of High Education institutions, highlighting my school. However, the issue is important enough to try to open new doors to explore new opportunities to address new needs. The next blog will address the issue of prerequisites in today’s job market, starting with the Supreme Court of the United States.

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Incorporating Changing Reality into College Strategic Plans: Part 5: Extending Boundaries

Posted on May 30, 2023 by climatechangefork

Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller

My last blog finished with a promise that this blog would propose ways to incorporate attempts to understand accelerated global changes into the strategic plans of local schools. Again, I will focus on my school. These changes include:

Mandated decarbonization

Mandated decrease in the use of single-use plastics

Testing of sewage for early detection of viral threats

Running schools with decreased enrollments

Preparing society for adaptation to extreme conditions.

Various aspects of these changes have served as the main topics for the more than 600 blogs I have posted over the last 11 years. Our students will spend their lives under such reality changes and our main job is to prepare them to function under such conditions. Every school’s strategic plan should be clear about the way that the school is trying to accomplish such a task.

It should be fully understood that global changes such as these require research to understand, adapt to, and mitigate the most damaging effects. School faculty usually cannot draw from their own experiences, whether direct or learned in school, to confront such changes but they are hired to teach their students how to function under such changing environments. All of this means that the accumulated knowledge has to come from research. Global changes such as these never take place simultaneously everywhere. The best way to learn how to function under such changes is to study places where these changing conditions hit hardest and early so feedback to action can also be generated early and analyzed.

As I mentioned earlier, CUNY is a federated university (see the May 17, 2023 blog, part 3 in this series) that covers 25 institutions (11 four-year colleges, 7 community colleges, and 7 graduate/professional schools) and a central administration. Adaptations that reflect the accelerating global changes are compatible with President Abraham Lincoln’s original creation of large-scale, state-based higher education in the form of land-grant universities:

A land-grant university (also called land-grant college or land-grant institution) is an institution of higher education in the United States designated by a state to receive the benefits of the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890.[1]

Signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, the first Morrill Act began to fund educational institutions by granting federally controlled land to the states for them to sell, to raise funds, to establish and endow “land-grant” colleges. The mission of these institutions as set forth in the 1862 act is to focus on the teaching of practical agriculture, science, military science, and engineering—although “without excluding other scientific and classical studies”—as a response to the industrial revolution and changing social class.[2][3] This mission was in contrast to the historic practice of higher education concentrating on a liberal arts curriculum. A 1994 expansion gave land-grant status to several tribal colleges and universities.[4]

Ultimately, most land-grant colleges became large public universities that today offer a full spectrum of educational opportunities. However, some land-grant colleges are private, including Cornell University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Tuskegee University.[5]

The key sentence of this introductory paragraph is that which clarifies that the institutions were meant to teach multiple topics—both “practical” and those relating to science and classical studies. At that time, the US reality was dominated by land and agriculture. Now it is changing quickly, as a result of anthropogenic (human-triggered) dominance. The need to adapt to the changing reality is the same. New universities need not be created but their curricula need to be changed to accommodate.

Map of Land-Grant Universities in the US

Figure 1 –The Land-Grant Universities in the US (Source: EveryCRSReport.com)

Back to the BC Strategic Plan. Aside from the creation of the Cancer Institute, the present strategic plan does not mention research content. However, this strategic plan is about to expire, to be replaced by a new one. I have no idea what shape the new plan will take, but I can hope and make suggestions.

CUNY has the advantage of being a multi-institutional organization with strong centralized governance. A few of the largest changes that need to be accommodated, such as timely decarbonization of energy use and decrease of single-use plastic, are mandated by the State and City governments. The university is now working on them and I am involved in this work.

These efforts are coordinated by the CUNY Central Sustainability Office (Sustainable CUNY, see June 4, 2019). To implement changes, the office invites representatives from each of the institutes to analyze issues and make recommendations. Usually, the results are not mandated by the central office. Rather, we see them as announcements from individual colleges that they are creating pilot projects. The colleges work with the central office to draft timelines and deliverables for the projects. The results are analyzed on a timely basis to decide if, how, and when, to extend these pilots to the entire university. Once this takes place, the changes become mandated.

These dynamics can be explicitly stated in the strategic plan.

Incorporating decarbonization of energy use and reducing the use of single-use plastic are both relatively simple, mandated changes. The pilot steps taken require feasibility and economic analyses but not scientific breakthroughs. Water stress and other calamities that result from climate change feedback can bring a major need for adaptations, in which new technology might be required. Here, we might take advantage of the federated structure of the country that we live in.

As I mentioned earlier, accelerated global changes do not hit either this country or the world uniformly. A good example is the impact of climate change on the water cycle.

Up to now, NYC, the place where I live and work, has hardly been impacted. The Southwest, where Sonya Landau, my friend, and the editor of this blog (June 22, 2021) lives, is already suffering temperatures in the upper 90s(oF) temperature and a multi-year drought. The region is now in a race against accelerated climate change, seeking ways to be less dependent on fresh water. There is no question in almost anyone’s mind that the water stress will expand to hit every corner of the world. The two recent references below will provide some background:

NYT Op-Ed: When One Almond Gulps 3.2 Gallons of Water

NPR: Arizona farmers rely on drought-stricken Colorado River to water crops

We all should be prepared—especially our students. We can strive to expand our boundaries and collaborate with schools in other areas to allow our students to do relevant research on these issues.

Next week’s blog will continue exploring the same line of thinking and will include experiences of College as a Lab and collaboration with local industry on college campuses.

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Incorporating Changing Reality into College Strategic Plans: Part 4: Incorporated Research

Posted on May 23, 2023 by climatechangefork

Physics laboratory at Brooklyn College

This blog tries to deliver on last week’s blog’s promise to look at the broader impacts of research in the Brooklyn College (BC) Strategic Plan. As I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs in this series, universities are endowed with the strongly interconnected dual functions of education and research. Much of the learning happens through research; at the same time, the structure of most universities is departmental, rooted in the education task. Furthermore, since most students come to universities in their late teens or early twenties with the expectation that the university will prepare them for a productive future of their choosing, the university’s vision should be focused on the future. Neither faculty nor students are prophets endowed with the ability to predict the future. Instead, the role of universities is to engage in research that contributes to understanding the past and present and draws sound consequences about the likely future and what needs to be done to prepare for a variety of scenarios that might develop.

All universities understand this mission. Again, as in previous blogs in this series, I will focus on my university (CUNY) and my College (Brooklyn College).

The key documents of the strategic plans, including the list of goals, were first mentioned in an earlier blog (May 2, 2023), however, I am repeating them below:

  • Goal 1: enhance our academic excellence.
  • Goal 2: increase undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students’ success.
  • Goal 3: educate students about opportunities for fulfilling work and leadership in their communities.
  • Goal 4: develop a nimble, responsive, and efficient structure to serve our students and carry out our mission.
  • Goal 5: leverage Brooklyn College’s reputation for academic excellence and upward mobility.

The two key documents include a 43-page detailed version  of the plan and a much shorter, tabular, version of 5 pages that focuses on the main performance indicators. Earlier blogs in this series focused on the shorter document. Taking only the Key Performance Indicators and Targets from the shorter tabular plan gives us the following entries, with the first number indicating the goal number:

1.2b Increase the average number of faculty pieces of scholarship/creative activity from 0.9 to 1.3 (2017-2018 PMP).

1.2c increased number of funded research grants from 45 to 53 (2017-2018 PMP).

4.4b Increase the total number of alumni donors by 30% from 5849 to 7644 (FY 2018, OIA). 4.4c Increase external funding (donor, grant and foundation support) by 50% from $8.9 million in FY 2018-2019 to $13.35 million in FY 2023 (OIA).

For more details, and to emphasize research, we need to examine the longer plan. Its typical structure consists of a list of objectives, along with a particular goal, the college office that will be held responsible, and a list of benchmarks to be followed. A brief reminder here, that shortly after this plan was instituted, we were all hit with the COVID-19 pandemic, which made most of the commitments difficult to follow. This week, I’m looking at three research-related examples from the latest strategic plan. Two of the examples are given below. I discuss the third one later in the blog.

  • Improve the office of grants and research:
    • Goal 1D:  Support and promote excellent research and increase sponsored research to advance intellectual inquiry.

 a. The Office of the Provost will enhance staffing and resources at the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs to meet the needs of faculty across the college.

YEAR 1 BENCHMARK: Assess the staffing needs of the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP) and evaluate its effectiveness for faculty.

YEAR 2 BENCHMARK: Hire full-time grants manager for the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences (NBS). The dean will develop a school-wide plan for NBS to enhance research.

YEAR 3 BENCHMARK: Make necessary staff and operations adjustments based on the assessment in Year 1. Deans across the campus will develop plans to enhance research.

YEARS 4 AND 5 BENCHMARKS: New staff will work with faculty to carry out the plans to apply for additional grants.

5-YEAR OUTCOMES: Enhance staffing of ORSP to enable enhanced support for the pursuit of grants across the five schools

d. The dean of the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences and the Brooklyn College Foundation will work with departments to generate funds and coordinate researchers on campus to create an interdisciplinary Brooklyn College Center for Cancer Research.

YEAR 1 BENCHMARK: Establish the Brooklyn College Center for Cancer Research through Brooklyn College and CUNY governance bodies. Develop a fundraising case for support for the Brooklyn College Center for Cancer Research.

YEAR 2 BENCHMARK: Develop a methodology of using Research Foundation indirect cost recovery funds to create a stream of revenue for operating costs for the Brooklyn College Center for Cancer Research.

YEAR 3 BENCHMARK: The dean of the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences and the Brooklyn College Foundation will develop a list of potential individual and institutional donors to support the Brooklyn College Center for Cancer Research. Solicit lead support for facilities, endowed positions, and research projects. Develop a public communications plan that supports the effort.

YEAR 4 BENCHMARK: Refine the case and expand fundraising solicitations for the Brooklyn College Center for Cancer Research to individual and institutional donors prospects.

YEAR 5 BENCHMARK: Steward lead gift donors and expand engagement of individual and institutional donor prospects for priority funding opportunities for the Brooklyn College Center for Cancer Research.

5-YEAR OUTCOMES: Enhance external funding for facilities and operations of the Brooklyn College Center for Cancer Research.

Similarly to the task of the Dean of Behavioral and Natural Sciences, all five college deans are tasked to “work with departments and programs to generate funds to advance research and creative work,” in areas relevant to their schools.

Not surprisingly, the content of the research is hardly mentioned (faculty don’t like to be told what research they should do). The only content-related entry is the recent establishment of a Cancer Center at Brooklyn College, which I’ve mentioned previously. However, all research needs financial support and successful, productive, research enhances the standing of the institution. The “broader impact” of addressing the needs of society beyond the university walls is accounted for in both versions of the plan. Table 1 addresses the relevant sections in the tabular plan, however, the key performance indicators have yet to be assigned for these particular segments:

Table 1 – Selected “broader impact” segments of BC Strategic Plan 2

Objective Strategic Action Priorities Key Performance Indicators and Targets
3.4 Prepare students to become engaged, global citizens and decision makers in a complex, diverse, and sustainable society. The Brooklyn College Foundation and the Office of International Education and Global Engagement will expand funding to support students to study, work, and intern abroad
5.3 Position and develop Brooklyn College as a vital resource to advance the public good in our borough. Brooklyn College, working closely with the Center for the Study of Brooklyn, will strengthen partnerships, with organizations and projects that share our commitment to advancing the public good, such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the New York City Department of Education, The New York City Department of Environmental Protection, the Mayor’s Office, community boards, city parks, the National Park Service, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Department of Sanitation’s Compost Project, and increase students’ opportunities to engage with them.

The needs for interdisciplinary training of society and students are addressed separately in Goal 1A-b of the detailed plan:

The provost and deans will support and encourage the cross-school development and success of curricula, programs, and major/minor pairs that promote interdisciplinary work.

YEAR 1 BENCHMARK: The deans will collaborate to prepare an inventory of existing major/minor pairs within schools and major/minor pairs across schools that promote interdisciplinary work. The deans will catalogue, communicate, and promote these pairs.

YEAR 2 BENCHMARK: Building upon existing programs and supporting new ideas, the deans will collaborate with faculty to assess potential new major/minor pairs that promote interdisciplinary work.

YEAR 3 BENCHMARK: The deans will support faculty and departments in the development of new curricula to promote the major/minor pairs identified in Year 2. Curriculum changes will be submitted to Faculty Council.

YEAR 4 BENCHMARK: Faculty and departments will teach courses in the new major/minor pairs. These will be documented and promoted to students. Additional pairs will be developed.

YEAR 5 BENCHMARK: The provost, deans, and departments will collaborate to assess the effectiveness of the new major/minor pairs for promoting interdisciplinary work.

5-YEAR OUTCOMES: A well-thought-out set of cross-school course offerings that meets the needs of students and faculty in participating departments, interdisciplinary programs, and schools will be documented and promoted.

We are now living in an era of accelerated changing global realities (See September 27, 2022 blog) in areas such as:

  • Mandated decarbonization
  • Mandated decrease in the use of single-use plastics
  • Testing of sewage for early detection of viral threats
  • Running schools with decreased enrollments
  • Preparing society for adaptation to extreme conditions.

The present BC strategic plans do not mention such changes. However, this strategic plan is about to expire, to be replaced by a new one. The next blog will focus on my thoughts about preparation for such changes in future strategic plans.

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Incorporating Changing Reality into College Strategic Plans: Part 3: How Do We Evaluate “Broader Impacts” in Research?

Posted on May 17, 2023 by climatechangefork

Image: Gray T-shirt with text: If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research would it? - Albert EinsteinThe picture above was taken from my favorite T-shirt, which features my favorite quote. It is also the main reason that I chose an academic career: to get a license to experiment. When I wear the shirt, it often triggers mixed responses despite Einstein’s name on the bottom. Often, people argue that there is a world of difference between not knowing what we are doing and investigating the unknown. From my perspective, regardless of interpretation, the quote strongly encourages experimentation with full knowledge that there is a high probability that most of the experiments will fail.

This is my 4th blog (starting with my Earth Day 2023 blog from April 25) about attempts to incorporate our changing reality into the strategic plan of my place of work. This time, the focus is on research.

Research and education go hand in hand in the role of every accredited university. This parity extends throughout history:

A university (from Latin universitas ‘a whole’) is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, the designation is reserved for colleges that have a graduate school.

The word university is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which roughly means “community of teachers and scholars”.[1]

The first universities in Europe were established by Catholic Church monks.[2][3][4][5][6] The University of Bologna (Università di Bologna), Italy, which was founded in 1088, is the first university in the sense of:

  • Being a high degree-awarding institute.

  • Having independence from the ecclesiastic schools, although conducted by both clergy and non-clergy.

  • Using the word universitas (which was coined at its foundation).

  • Issuing secular and non-secular degrees: grammar, rhetoric, logic, theology, canon law, notarial law.[7][8][9][10][11]

Before I proceed further, I have to add a word about the designation of my working place as “University.” Wikipedia defines a university as a “college that has a graduate school.” As mentioned earlier, my working place is the City University of New York (CUNY). It goes far beyond a single graduate school. As our present Chancellor said, CUNY is:

…the premier and largest urban public university in the United States, serving approximately 226,000 degree-seeking students, 150,000 in adult and continuing education programs, and 40,000 faculty and staff at our 11 four-year colleges, seven community colleges and seven graduate and professional schools.

I am associated with Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Individual colleges and universities are subject to periodic external evaluation by accredited agencies:

The goal of accreditation is to ensure that education provided by institutions of higher education meets acceptable levels of quality. Here you will find a list of accrediting agencies recognized by the U.S. Secretary of Education as reliable authorities concerning the quality of education or training offered by the institutions of higher education or higher education programs they accredit.

Students apply to individual colleges. Every college has its own strategic plan that is publicized on its website, for applying students to consider. However, in a federated university like ours, the college’s strategic plan has to conform with its university’s strategic plan. CUNY is a public university, whose goal is to enable every qualified student to enter, regardless of economic considerations. To accomplish this mission, CUNY, and hence its individual colleges, need public support. Because of CUNY’s structural complexities, public support comes from both New York State and the City. Present budget allocations for next year were announced recently (the Chancellor’s comments, quoted above, were part of this process). State and City governments are carefully looking at the strategic plans for indications that the public institution can make significant contributions that will benefit the general public in their constituencies.

Much of the support for the research that runs on US college campuses comes from the Federal Government rather than directly from the locality in which the school resides. The agency that supports much of this research is the National Science Foundation (NSF) (put NSF in the search box to find earlier entries on this agency). The NSF doesn’t look at the strategic plan of the researchers’ school (they look at the school to examine other aspects). The NSF wants to make sure that they are funding, on a competitive basis, the best proposals submitted as far as the quality of the science is concerned. However, an important consideration in the funding is the concept of “broader impact,” which the NSF defines as follows:

The Broader Impacts discussion is a critical component of any proposal submitted to the U.S. National Science Foundation. It answers the following question: How does your research benefit society?

The concept of broader impacts is not yet officially recognized on a local level, but unofficially, it is an important part of any lobbying activities for more resources.

Next week’s blog will try to look at the broader impacts of the Brooklyn College (BC) strategic plan.

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Incorporating Changing Reality into College Strategic Plans: Part 2: Matching Students’ Expectations

Posted on May 9, 2023 by climatechangefork

This series of blogs started around Earth Day (April 25, 2023 post), with a question of how best to incorporate Earth Day’s aspiration on a local level. I decided to focus on my own college and university: Brooklyn College (BC) and CUNY.

Within this focus, last week’s blog started with a recent NYT summary of what students expect from their college experiences and what my college offers through its strategic plan. As I mentioned then, my college’s most recent strategic plan applies to the years 2018-2023, meaning it’s about to expire. The plan spans 43 pages; last week’s blog covered only an introductory paragraph and two lists of associated documents and goals. The purpose of this and the following blogs are two-fold. First, I want to examine how we could correlate our strategic plans with students’ aspirations; doing so would make the plans useful as a student recruitment tool. At the same time, by being at the forefront of addressing societal challenges, we could justify the support that the university is getting from society.

The two key documents are the BC Strategic Plan (revised August 1, 2018) and Strategic Plan 2, which was drafted in April 2019 and includes the tabulation and prioritization of objectives, key performance indicators, and targets. As I mentioned earlier, the original strategic plan spans 43 pages while the tabulated form is only 5 pages.

As I mentioned in the previous blog, the plan has 5 goals that I am repeating below:

  • Goal 1: enhance our academic excellence.
  • Goal 2: increase undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students’ success.
  • Goal 3: educate students about opportunities for fulfilling work and leadership in their communities.
  • Goal 4: develop a nimble, responsive, and efficient structure to serve our students and carry out our mission.
  • Goal 5: leverage Brooklyn College’s reputation for academic excellence and upward mobility

The goals each include 4 objectives, except goal 4, which has 5 objectives.

Table 1

Objective Strategic Action Priorities Key Key Performance Indicators and Targets
1.1 Improve undergraduate, master’s and doctoral programs that distinguish our strengths in the liberal arts, science, business, creative arts, and education to support students for success locally and globally. The provost, deans, chairs, departments, and Faculty Council will critically examine our undergraduate and graduate academic offerings through regular program reviews, external evaluations, and annual assessment plan and reports. The analysis will ensure that our curricula, majors, and programs reflect emerging knowledge and skills and deliver academic excellence and value to our students. 1.1a All academic programs and departments will engage in detailed analyses to ensure academic excellence, alignment with the College’s mission, integration of emerging knowledge, and value to our students.

1.2a Increase the percentage of underrepresented minority faculty hired from 20.8 to 30% (2016-2017 IPEDS).
1.2 Attract, develop, and retain an innovative, diverse, productive, and engaged faculty and staff. The Office of Diversity and Equity Programs will require department specific affirmative action plans for tenure track, lecturer, substitute, and adjunct faculty to enhance opportunities in the areas where they are underrepresented 1.2b Increase the average number of faculty pieces of scholarship/creative activity from 0.9 to 1.3 (2017-2018 PMP).

1.2c increased number of funded research grants from 45 to 53 (2017-2018 PMP).

Table 1 shows two of the four objectives of the first goal: enhancing our academic excellence. The table ends with key performance indicators for each objective.

As can be seen above, the Strategic Plan is a very good assessment plan, with numerical targets that can be periodically assessed to indicate success or failure. One of the key documents in the strategic plan is the attached report card that summarizes how we are doing. However, the only report card available is from 2018-2019, which serves as a reminder that most of the plan covered the COVID-19 pandemic period, where all our best intentions were temporarily frozen.

I don’t serve in any administrative position in my college and I have no role in the decision-making of running the college. However, I am the assessment coordinator of my department and I serve in the Campus Planning Committee of our Faculty Council, which periodically meets with some of our top administrators. I suppose that makes me a “qualified observer.”

Strategic plans are common to almost all academic institutions. I haven’t gone over many of them but it is a safe bet that many of the goals are similar throughout.

If we try to compare this set of goals with student aspirations as documented in the NYT piece that I summarized in the previous blog (on which CUNY ended up rather well), we might end up wondering.

Figure 1 in last week’s blog was compiled to summarize students’ expectations from prospective students (ages 16 – 19) and recent graduates.

The top six priorities of the two groups were the following:

Pre-Freshmen: Affordable tuition, high-income potential for graduates, safe campus, low student debt after graduation, near family or hometown, and popularity of STEM majors.

Recent graduates: Affordable tuition, high earning potential for graduates, low student debt after graduation, safe campus, popularity of STEM majors, and racial and ethnic diversity.

As the NYT piece mentioned, the top criteria for both groups are financial. The three categories of top ten schools that Frank Bruni compiled all demonstrate high earning potential. So, if a school wants to attract students and financial support, it had better show the potential for future high earnings or at least significant improvements in earning potential.

To show potential high earnings, schools have to demonstrate a trail of significant earnings increases by graduates. A high earning goal is not enough (you can start rich), schools have to show significantly enhanced earning potential. However, proving such a change does not seem to be one of the goals included in the strategic plan itself.

A goal should indicate how graduates will do at least a few years after they leave school. There is a Wikipedia site that indicates this for Brooklyn College graduates. It’s organized by profession, and it is impressive. A summary of the site is shown the following results:

Listed (famous) alumni in all disciplines             1602

Famous alumni who graduated after 2000           39

Earliest famous alumni graduated in                      1933

The total number of alumni according to the BC official website is 160,000, meaning that the Wikipedia site only accounts for 1% of the total. Can one expect prospective students (or ones that just finished school) to associate their own prospects with this 1%? I doubt it. Colleges can do much better. They need to construct a much broader database of alumni and one that will better reflect how the college has been doing more recently. In a number of past recent blogs, I have advocated using the college as a laboratory for students to address current local and global challenges such as climate change (see Campus as a Lab Part 5 – October 4, 2022, and the earlier blogs in this series). Through this model, Social Science students can help construct such a database and pave the way for presenting the results to prospective students.

Next week, I will try to learn from the US federal government how to apply the concept of “broader impact” to the strategic plans of learning institutions.

Posted in Climate Change | 1 Comment

Incorporating Changing Reality into College Strategic Plans: Part 1

Posted on May 2, 2023 by climatechangefork

Last week’s blog focused on the celebration of Earth Day, ending with a promise that this week’s blog would focus on a local effort. The natural local effort for me to address is my place of work: the City University of New York (CUNY). As I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs (September 20, 2022, and April 18, 2023), CUNY is a multi-campus institution. My home campus is Brooklyn College and the central Graduate Center of the university. Like many other universities throughout the country and the world, we are now living through a transition period on many levels. I’ve mentioned many of these transitions repeatedly in earlier blogs, including the global need to change our energy sources away from fossil fuels, registration decline as a result of the decrease in population, adaptation to the tail-end of the COVID-19 pandemic, budgetary constraints, etc. These pressures are not unique to my school. Nor, in most cases, are they unique to the US; they are global. CUNY is a public institution that is supported by the state and city of NY. Like most other universities during the pandemic, most teaching and learning were remote. Like many other institutions and places of work, it was also supported by the federal government. This support is now ending and registration is still lagging behind pre-pandemic levels. Mandatory budget cuts are in the works, yet the amount is not yet known because the state budget is behind schedule (it should be voted on this week). Brooklyn College’s president has assembled a committee that includes students, faculty, and staff to advise him where to make the changes in ways that we don’t deviate from the college’s strategic plan. The goal is to avoid sacrificing our future to accommodate the present.

At the same time, state and city mandates require us to start to implement an energy transition away from fossil fuels so the state can be in the lead for zero carbon toward midcentury. If we don’t show progress on this front, the school will be fined. The guiding document for the required actions rests in the college’s strategic plan. The rest of this blog, and the following few blogs, will explore ways to accommodate fast-changing realities in that document.

Educational institutions have the clearest vision on this issue because we exist to ensure a better future for our students; if students don’t think that we are doing a good job at preparing them for the future, they will not come, and we will have to close shop.

Recently, an analysis was done on students’ motivation for colleges and universities.

The analysis was summarized by Frank Bruni in a New York Times op-ed entitled, “There’s Only One College Rankings List That Matters”:

Over recent decades, tuition at many public and private schools has risen much faster than inflation in general, to heights that have led millions of students to take on a magnitude of debt that dogs them and dictates their job decisions deep into their post-college lives. Still other students wonder whether college is even worth it in the end. The sticker price for tuition, room, board and required fees at some private schools is now over $80,000 per year.

Small wonder, then, that when The Times and Morning Consult surveyed 2,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 19 and another 2,000 between the ages of 22 and 30, those respondents rated the affordability of tuition and their likely earnings after graduation as the most important factors in the college experience — many times more important than, say, whether varsity sports are a major part of campus life or how small the size of a typical class is.

Figure 1 (source: Morning Consult via NYT)

The article’s conclusion, from the variety of responses in the poll, is that students’ priorities for choosing colleges mostly fall within the following three categories:

  1. If you’re a prospective student, your main consideration in choosing a college is likely the prospect for high earnings – the Ivy League schools dominate the top 10 choices (with some business school exceptions).
  2. If your priority is high earnings + low price, the top 10 are still dominated by Ivy Leagues but the exceptions include CUNY Bernard Baruch College.
  3. For those whose priorities are high earning + low price + less selective, CUNY schools make up half the top 10 selections.

I haven’t seen the raw data bases on which these rankings are based. However, the main point of the article is to show that there are many ways to rank colleges based on students’ priorities and preferences. Nevertheless, it appears that my place of work ranks decently, which is always heartening.

Let me now go from the country’s level to the document that outlines our goals and objectives. It attempts to figure out how to incorporate changing realities into our operations in such a way that after students leave the institution, they will be able to effectively and productively operate within the shifting world.

At Brooklyn College, the key document to achieving these objectives is the Strategic Plan. The most recent 43-page strategic plan covers the years 2018-2023. The introductory paragraph, given below, emphasizes the flexibility of the document:

The Brooklyn College community developed the Strategic Plan 2018-2023 (pdf) through an extraordinarily inclusive and transparent process. The Plan is not designed to sit on a shelf: it is a living document. Through internal and external evaluation, we learned that the Plan was too complex and that we needed to prioritize its strategic actions and develop its key performance indicators. We completed this work at the end of April 2019. The streamlined Strategic Plan is entitled Strategic Plan 2.0 (pdf). We undertook the process described below to do this work. By clicking on the hyperlinks, you can review the corresponding documents.

The rest of the document outlines the individual sections followed by the school’s goals.

Documents

Goals from the Strategic Plan 2018 – 2013:

  • Introduction
  • Purpose, mission, vision, and values
  • Goal 1: enhance our academic excellence.
  • Goal 2: increase undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students’ success.
  • Goal 3: educate students for fulfilling work and leadership in their communities.
  • Goal 4: develop a nimble, responsive, and efficient structure to serve our students and carry out our mission.
  • Goal 5: leverage Brooklyn College’s reputation for academic excellence and upward mobility

In next week’s blog, I will try to expand the plan and suggest how we can incorporate the major changes in global reality that have taken place over the plan’s 2018-2023 span.

Posted in Education, Energy | Leave a comment

Earth Day 2023

Posted on April 25, 2023 by climatechangefork

Earth Day celebration logo

 (Source: Houston Arboretum)

This is obviously not my first blog titled Earth Day. Just put the title in the search box and start investigating. The day is unique for me on two levels: it celebrates our physical environment and commitments to preserve it for future generations and it falls on my wife’s birthday. She often indicates that saving the world might count as a proper birthday present.

This blog will be fully dedicated to Earth Day. This year, April 22 fell on Saturday. Since Earth Day celebrates the ever-changing physical environment and our reaction to it, it is not surprising that I feel a need to revisit it on an almost yearly basis; I feel I can justify this with fresh observations. In addition, since the focus is on the physical environment and its interactions with humans on a global scale, a productive celebration requires a foundation in the physical sciences displayed in a way designed to be understood by everyone.

I will start with a short Wikipedia history and the global scope that this day is now (fittingly) acquiring:

Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First held on April 22, 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EARTHDAY.ORG (formerly Earth Day Network)[1] including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries.[2][1][3] The official theme for 2023 is Invest In Our Planet.[4][5]

The first Earth Day was focused on the United States. In 1990, Denis Hayes, the original national coordinator in 1970, took it international and organized events in 141 nations.[11][12][13] On Earth Day 2016, the landmark Paris Agreement was signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and 120 other countries. This signing satisfied a key requirement for the entry into force of the historic draft climate protection treaty adopted by consensus of the 195 nations present at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. Numerous communities engaged in Earth Day Week actions, an entire week of activities focused on the environmental issues that the world faces.[14] On Earth Day 2020, over 100 million people around the world observed the 50th anniversary in what is being referred to as the largest online mass mobilization in history.[3]

Anthropogenic (human-made) climate change is the biggest threat that we are experiencing in the physical environment. Most of us recognize the threat, and we are trying to do something about it. The largest component of the anthropogenic threat is still the use of fossil fuels (mainly coal, natural gas, and gasoline) as our main energy sources. These involve oxidation of the fossil fuels, a process that liberates and emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Thus, the main mitigation step requires an energy transition to sustainable sources that do not liberate the stored energy (stored in the chemical bond of the fossil fuels), and therefore don’t emit greenhouse gases. The most straightforward approach to achieving this objective is to transform most of our energy use to electricity and produce electricity with sustainable energy sources. But, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly in earlier blogs, electricity is a secondary energy source that must be generated through the use of primary sources. Until very recently, these primary sources were exclusively from fossil fuels. However, the global energy transition in electricity production is now starting to become visible, as can be seen in Figure 2 and the following two paragraphs from an article in Scientific American:

Figure 2 – Global generation of electricity by source
(Amanda Montañez via Scientific American)

Last year renewables produced more electricity than coal-powered plants for the first time in the U.S. Wind and solar now produce about 14 percent of the country’s electricity, up from virtually nothing just 25 years ago. The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects that more than half of electric generation capacity added to the nation’s grid in 2023 will be from solar energy.

The main reason renewable energy has grown so much in recent years is a dramatic decline in the expense of generating solar and wind power. The cost of solar photovoltaic cells has dropped a stunning 90 percent over the past decade, partly because of ramped-up manufacturing—particularly in China—Bahar says. Government subsidies in countries such as the U.S. also helped renewables grow in the early years, as did policies making commitments to renewable adoption, says Inês Azevedo, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy. For example, many U.S. states set standards for how much of their electricity needs should be met with renewable energy by a particular year.

In New York City, where I live and teach, Mayor Adams just delivered an Earth Day present by resurrecting and retargeting ex-mayor Bloomberg’s (2002-2013)  PlaNYC program:

Mayor Adams Releases Ambitious Plan to ‘Get Sustainability Done’ — Full Funding to Come

The wide-ranging agenda, known as PlaNYC, includes proposals for electric car chargers, free solar arrays, and help for New Yorkers living in flood zones.

Adams’ first PlaNYC follows his efforts to expand food waste recycling citywide and cut emissions associated with food purchases by expanding plant-based offerings. In alignment with the state climate law, Adams’ agenda aims to run the city on electricity that doesn’t emit planet-warming gases — instead relying on sources like solar, wind and hydropower — by 2040, and to slash emissions from transportation, buildings and waste a decade after that.

But the administration says it is focused on improving quality of life issues sooner than that.

I am convinced and hopeful (but haven’t checked), that other local governments, around the world, are also in the process of giving presents to their citizens by mandating tools to preserve their environment and facilitate adaptation to future environmental changes.

In the US we also received a new national present from the federal government that has a good chance of significantly expediting the process:

The United States is on the brink of its most consequential transformation since the New Deal. Read more about what it takes to decarbonize the economy, and what stands in the way, here.

For the first time in history, the full financial weight of the United States federal government is aligned behind an epic transition to clean energy. A trio of energy, infrastructure, and science laws passed by the last Congress will deploy more than half a trillion dollars of public funding over the next decade to wean us off fossil fuels and make greener alternatives cheap and ubiquitous.

Uncle Sam will pick up a huge chunk of the tab for energy sources like wind and solar, and cleaner consumer choices like electric vehicles and heat pumps. Thanks to these new laws, which will also unlock hundreds of billions in private investment in clean energy, it’ll simply be the smarter financial decision to choose clean over dirty in the countless decisions made by millions of households and businesses. With the thumb firmly on the clean side of the scale, the fight against climate change in America has fundamentally changed.

And yet the work is just getting started.

In next week’s blog (and probably a few of those following) I will explore some of the complexities that we encounter by trying to celebrate Earth Day on a local level.

Posted in Electricity, Energy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Teaching Students to be Involved in the Energy Transition

Posted on April 18, 2023 by climatechangefork

Spring Break at Brooklyn College

I am starting this blog at the tail-end of spring break at my university (CUNY). It will be posted as classes recommence for a month, followed by final exams and the summer break. This is a great time to start thinking about next semester’s classes. Over the fall of 2023, I will be teaching two courses focused on climate change and one on cosmology.

One of the two courses on climate change is part of our general education program and the other is more advanced, catering to our Honors College. The honors class is focused on our local mitigation and adaptation activities. My teaching in this course is part of a broader program focused on “Campus as a Lab” that I described in an earlier series of blogs (the last one in this series was from October 4, 2022). I am trying to approach the concept on various levels, spreading it around the campus at every opportunity. The details are summarized in the earlier blog.

Two weeks ago I got an invitation to attend a Zoom meeting that was co-organized by my university’s sustainability office and Con Ed, the dominant power company in New York City. The meeting was a workshop for solar and energy storage installers, part of a regular series of meetings that CUNY’s sustainability office organizes. The last one was pre-pandemic and was described in an earlier blog (July 2, 2019). I am attaching below the agenda for this meeting:

2023 NYC Solar+Storage Installer Workshop AGENDA

9:00 am Welcome and Workshop Overview

Tria Case, Exec Dir of Sustainability & Energy Conservation, CUNY
Sustainable CUNY’s Smart DG Hub: Accessing TA & Permitting Resources

Daniella Leifer, DG Ombudsman Emily Sweeney, Solar Ombudsman

9:15 am Con Ed Incentives, Interconnection Requirements, and Processes Opening Remarks

Shaun Smith, Director, Distribution Planning

Demand Response Program Gerianna Cohen, EE Program Manager EV Initiatives

Kevon Brown, Sr. Specialist, E-Mobility & Demonstrations FERC 2222 – NYISO Aggregator Participation Model Wassim Saloum, Project Specialist, Distribution Planning Kishan Patel, Project Specialist, Distribution Planning Utility Energy Storage

Masum Ahmed, Associate Engineer, Dist. Planning Technical Update from Dist. Engineering Constantine Spanos, Sr. Engineer Interconnection & Policy Updates

Christine Gorman, Sr. Specialist Julio Tardaguia, Project Specialist DG Ombudsman Team

10:30 am Sustainable CUNY’s Collaboration with FDNY

Daniella Leifer, DG Ombudsman Emily Sweeney, Solar Ombudsman

10:45 am Updates to FDNY Application Processes for Solar and Storage

John Ingenito, Supervisor – Rooftop Access Unit, FDNY Yash Patel, Engineering Consultant, FDNY

1:15 pm NYCHA’s ACCESSolar Program

Ron Reisman, NYC Solar Partnership Program Manager, Sustainable CUNY Christopher White, Program Manager – Sustainability, NYCHA

1:40 pm Updates to DOB Construction and Electrical Permits and Material Acceptance Application Processes

Yarnell Williams, Assistant Chief Plan Examiner, NYC Dept. of Buildings Abderrahim Charguini, Assistant Plan Examiner, NYC Dept. of Buildings Alan Price, Director, Office of Technical Certification & Research

3:10 pm Panel Discussion – NYC Solar and Storage Industry Outlook

Noah Ginsburg, Executive Director, NYSEIA Denise Sheehan, Senior Policy Advisor, NY-BEST Facilitated by Emily Sweeney and Daniella Leifer

3:30 pm Wrap-up and Next Steps

Ron Reisman, NYC Solar Partnership Program Manager, Sustainable CUNY

I am not a solar or energy storage installer and I am not trying to teach my students to become them. Two recent guest blogs that described the experience of solar installation (the last on March 21, 2023), are my only connections to the topic. The agenda of the meeting is so full of abbreviations that I had to use Google to decipher them. I will save you the effort and try to summarize them:

Sustainable CUNY’s Smart DG Hub: Accessing TA & Permitting Resources:

This collaborative effort was expanded to include energy storage systems (ESS) in 2013 and was formalized as the Smart DG Hub. Today, the Smart DG Hub’s dedicated and knowledgeable Ombudsmen provide support to the solar and storage industries as well as NYC agency staff who are tasked with creating new solar and energy storage regulatory structures (https://www1.cuny.edu/sites/sustainable/solar/nysolar-smart/)

FERC 2222 – NYISO Aggregator: NYISO is NY Independent System Operators; FERC is Federal Energy Regulation Commission.

FDNY – NYC Fire Department

NYCHA – NYC Housing Authority

DOB – NYC Department of Buildings

What intrigued me was the complexity that installers have to go through in order to make their input to our energy transition. While listening to the presentations I decided on a reasonable objective, that I can try to accomplish next semester with my students and with anybody else willing to listen: to try to guide them through the terrain of what else is being done to accomplish the same objective, including mapping the hierarchy of the organizations working on the problem.

I even came up with a new disciplinary name for the effort: Sociology of the Global Energy Transition. This is a reasonable title for a joint major of the Sociology Department and an interested STEM Department similar to the new collaborative majors that I described in an earlier blog (February 21, 2023).

According to Britannica, Sociology is defined as:

a social science that studies human societies, their interactions, and the processes that preserve and change them. It does this by examining the dynamics of constituent parts of societies such as institutions, communities, populations, and gender, racial, or age groups. Sociology also studies social status or stratification, social movements, and social change, as well as societal disorder in the form of crime, deviance, and revolution.

Achieving the global objective of zero-carbon energy sourcing within a reasonable time will require efforts by all constituents of human societies to address needed changes in the physical environment. The line of thinking for students (and others) starts with “What can I do?” It often continues with “What is everybody else doing?” and “What will happen if I do nothing?” I will focus below on a derivative of these relevant questions:

“What can students on my campus do to speed up the energy transition?” To answer this question the students will have to recognize the roles that everybody else related to their campus is playing.

For students of my campus the sociology of the process will follow this narrowing focus:

Global > Federal > State > Local (City) > University > College. When a student on my campus is asked what this campus can do to approach the zero-carbon objective he/she will probably answer the obvious – change all energy sources from fossil to sustainable sources. Unfortunately, on my campus, that cannot be done. CUNY is a multi-campus consortia institution whose real-estate and energy delivery —as I’ve described earlier (September 20, 2022)—are controlled by the central government. So, such changes would have to be top-down. Students, however, will have to look at bottom-up solutions. In collaboration with everybody else on campus, they can make important contributions through more efficient use of energy. There are also ways for the university and the campuses to encourage energy savings. I will explore some of the possibilities in future blogs.

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