Sustainability Thinking and Entrepreneurship: A Case Study

Academic entrepreneurship, in its narrowest sense, involves the creation of new business ventures by university and college faculty, administrators, and students. More broadly, academic entrepreneurship seeks to establish connections across disciplines, between and academic affairs, and between the campus and community. It draws on the spirit of innovation, creativity, and opportunity that animates entrepreneurial activity in the business world to provide the richest learning experience possible for students. Academic entrepreneurship has been part of Ithaca College's institutional DNA since its founding in 1892 as a music conservatory. Ithaca, an independent, predominantly undergraduate college of 6,400 students in the Finger Lakes region of New York, offers a diverse curriculum in more than one hundred degree programs in business, communications, health sciences and human performance, humanities and sciences, music, and interdisciplinary studies. The music program's original emphasis on performance and hands-on learning spread throughout the curriculum as the college grew, influencing other programs in theater arts, physical education, physical therapy, radio, and television. As a founding member of Associated New American Colleges, a national consortium of about twenty small and mid-sized institutions, Ithaca is committed to Ernest Boyer's vision of an undergraduate education that combines liberal and professional learning with a strong emphasis on experiential learning and civic engagement. This marriage of pragmatism and idealism equips Ithaca students with the ability to solve real-world problems in ways that advance the college's core values: intellect, character, creativity, community, and global citizenship. The recent campus-wide sustainability initiative is but the latest manifestation of Ithaca's distinctive brand of undergraduate education. What is sustainability? In 1987 the United Nation's Brundtland Report defined sustainability as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainability acknowledges the interdependence of society, the economy, and the environment, and it encourages long-term, strategic thinking that promotes effective stewardship of our natural, social, and economic resources. The growing global crisis in sustainability has led the United Nations to declare 2005-2014 the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. This initiative seeks to raise awareness about future challenges and how individual and collective choices regarding the allocation of resources affect the quality of life of people around the world. Ithaca College has been exploring and applying the concept of sustainability for several years. Our sustainability initiative involves three dimensions: the curriculum, college operations, and community outreach. The framework supplied by sustainability thinking-with its emphasis on interconnectedness, the dynamic nature of complex systems, and the importance of taking the long view-has much in common with the strategic approach adopted by the college's institutional plan. Indeed, the move towards sustainability has emerged organically out of the priorities established by the institutional plan. One of the priorities, for example, is to expand field-based, experiential, and performance-based learning. Specifically, the plan seeks to promote student engagement in and out of the classroom and . . . commitment to service and community involvement. In pursuit of these goals, the environmental studies faculty forged a unique collaboration in 2002 with EcoVillage of Ithaca, an intentional community dedicated to modeling innovative approaches to ecological, economic, and social sustainability. The one-hundred-and-seventy-six acre EcoVillage encompasses not only co-housing and an education center but also habitat for land conservation and restoration as well as organic agriculture. …