New president aims to make PSU top green University

By Chris Lydgate

Pamplin Media Group, Oct 16, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

JONATHAN HOUSE / PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP

New president Wim Wiewel wants Portland State University to achieve world leader status in sustainability disciplines such as urban planning, environmental studies and ecology.

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What Harvard is to law.

What MIT is to engineering.

What Johns Hopkins is to medicine.

That’s what Wim Wiewel wants Portland State University to be to sustainability.

Ambitious? Sure. But Wiewel, PSU’s new president, has reason for optimism. The university already offers dozens of courses on sustainability spread out among several disciplines, including environmental studies, ecology, transportation, business and urban planning. PSU is on track to use 100 percent renewable energy by 2010.

And last month, barely three weeks into his tenure, Wiewel had the singular pleasure of announcing that the university had snagged the biggest gift in its history: a $25 million grant from the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation, designed to strengthen research and education in sustainability.

But there will be plenty of competition. PSU’s new emphasis on sustainability comes at a time when colleges around the nation are scrambling to figure out how to green their catalogs and attract top-notch professors and students.

Sustainable Life recently caught up with Wiewel to find out how PSU fits into Portland’s quest to become the mecca of the green movement.

How did it feel to walk into a new job and find a $25 million present?

I tell people, it’s better to be lucky than to be smart. To me it’s evidence that people feel that Portland State hasn’t reached its potential yet.

It has a lot of momentum, but much greater things are expected of the institution. This place is critical to the future of Portland, and it can do far more than it has been able to do so far. But it needs resources and support.

This gift is clearly significant for PSU, but why should anyone care outside campus?

At the most general level, I believe that universities have become anchor institutions for their metropolitan areas, whereas in the ’50s and ’60s, the anchor institutions were the local newspaper, the local utility, the local bank, the local department store, the local manufacturer. Most of those places are no longer around, or if they are, they are no longer locally owned.

But universities have an enduring presence. Fifty years from now, you can bet Portland State will still be here. We have to step up to the plate to really think about the future of the city, because we can’t count on others to do that for us.

We focused on sustainability not because the foundation told us to. They’re not an environmental organization — they asked us, What can we do to strengthen the institution?

We picked sustainability, first, because we already have a lot of bench strength in that area. Second, it’s something that’s applicable across the institution, not just one or two departments.

But third is that this fits so well with Portland’s strengths. There is a halo effect. Oregon is known for environmental stuff. Portland is known for environmental stuff. So by focusing on sustainability, we take advantage of that — and contribute to it.

People will come to Portland State because they know they can find jobs here when they graduate. This is deeply embedded in the economic, social and political structure of this community.

How will you spend the money?

We will use it to attract superb students who are interested in sustainability from around the world. We will use it to support our own faculty research and to attract new and visiting scholars. But we don’t have a list yet of exactly who’s going to get how much. But we will make all decisions based on the principle, Does it advance our status as a global leader in sustainability?

Is the word “sustainability” in danger of being overused or hijacked by marketing types?

I think there’s a challenge in that regard. Once we announced the gift, I had several people telling me that surely by sustainability we meant — fill in the blank.

We do have a specific definition that talks about the triple bottom line — environmental, economic and social. But I don’t want it to get so broad that it means every good thing in the world.

But when you want to get a real shift in people’s minds, you have to do more than invent new gizmos or manage your resources differently. You have to deal with the issue of culture. So thinking about man’s relation to nature — the sort of thing the philosophy department does — is totally relevant. Sustainability is not a purely technical issue. It’s also a cultural and philosophical issue.

You were originally a sociologist. Do you ever look at sustainability as a social movement?

There were times when my oldest kids were in grade school, 20 years ago, they would come home with environmentalism as a religion. This was a wonderful thing because they could use it as a club to beat their parents with.

“Mom, how dare you throw away that can?” Kids love to be self-righteous. And some people obviously worship at the Church of the Bicycle here in Portland.

So there are ways to think about this as a movement that has aspects of a religious or social movement. That’s important to study as well: How do people create a social movement around an idea like this? What about that is good and what is problematic?

What has been your biggest surprise?

I am stunned by the poor funding of higher education in this state. It was a surprise, frankly. If you’re going to compete in the global economy, which is a knowledge economy, you’ve got to invest in education, and you can’t do that on a shoestring.

The per capita funding in Oregon for higher ed is 46th in the nation. That’s down from 23rd in the nation 20 years ago. At the same time, tuition is below the national median for public universities. Yes, everybody thinks tuition is too high, and I would love to make it lower. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have weak state support, low tuition and deliver world-class education.

So are you calling for higher tuition?

I see education as a public good, so I prefer tuition as low as possible. That’s better for access and for equity.

Does PSU rely too much on overseas students for its financial viability?

No, I don’t think so. About 6 percent of our student body is from overseas. I would like to see that at 9 or 10 percent because they bring wonderful diversity, and we live in a global economy, so it’s important for our students to have that exposure and for us to create connections to these students who are going to go back to their own countries.

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