The PresRelease is my own little page where I can share items of interest, celebration, or concern with my University colleagues. It's my hope to update things here every few days. If you'd like to get in touch with me, I invite you to email me at this address: president@uconn.edu.
I might use one of your emails for a future posting.
UConn has improved its rating from a year ago and is now listed as a “Campus Sustainability Leader” in the 2008-09 Green Report Card, which was released last week by the Sustainable Endowments Institute. If you go to the link, type in ‘Connecticut’ in the search box. Our overall grade went from a C last year to a B this year.
Only eight state public universities in the nation were rated higher than UConn and 12 others received the same overall rating, including several of our “aspirational” peers: Cal-Berkeley, UVA, Wisconsin-Madison and Michigan.
This is the Sustainable Endowments Institute’s third edition of the College Sustainability Report Card, which examines campus and endowment sustainability policies at 300 colleges and universities in the United States and in Canada. According to SEI, “[t]he aim is to provide accessible information so that schools may learn from each other’s experiences, thereby fostering more effective sustainability policies. The report assesses 43 indicators, from green building initiatives to recycling programs to endowment investment policies, and uses an A to F letter-grading system to evaluate performance.”
Here’s the link to SEI’s report card for all 300 college and universities.
And thanks to UConn’s Director of Environmental Policy Rich Miller for this info.
I got my report card from the Daily Campus today. A solid A-/B+, depending on your grading scale. But of course this is before the upward adjustment for the usual grade inflation, which would probably convert the grade to an A+. So I’m very happy with the results. Besides, since I already have a good job I don’t have to worry about getting into a top-notch law school.
Looking at the Daily Campus, I got to thinking about my report cards in grade school when we would get marks like ‘Good,’ ‘Satisfactory,’ and ‘Unsatisfactory’ for our personal behavior. I was once in a class where the teacher asked us to make out our own report cards and explain the grades we gave ourselves. So I did that here, based on the cards I used to get. Here are the results:
I had to give myself an S- for General Deportment in my second twelve weeks because of getting too exuberant at a Women’s Basketball game in Gampel. But as you can see, I think I’m improving. I didn’t give myself any E’s (Excellent) since I can always do better. Besides, these are not adjusted for grade inflation!
Dining Services harvested its first batch of honey from the hives they set up last spring here in Mansfield. Channel 3 reported the harvest: you might want to watch their video that’s posted in their online story. They use a machine called an extractor to remove the honey from the combs – it’s much like a centrifugal machine used in some science laboratories:
The results are worth waiting for. I might think about having some honey on my next UConn Dairy Bar ice cream.
On September 19 our UConn School of Pharmacy team of P4 students Sarah Hooker and Renee Larouche won the first annual New England Pharmacy College “Pepto Bowl” at the 2008 New England Pharmacists Convention at the Mohegan Sun Resort. This competition, a combination of Jeopardy and the old college bowl game shows, pitted our two students and a UConn pharmacy alumnus against our NE pharmacy peers in a competition focused on self-care. Special thanks go to Dr. Devra Dang for her exceptional work in preparing our team, and to Dr. Phil Hritcko and Peter Tyczkowski for serving on the planning committee.
Prof. Devra Dang
The “Pepto Bowl,” endowed by our friends at Procter & Gamble, will be engraved with the University’s name and be on display in our School of Pharmacy for the next year.
