Audit 2001 - Campus Priorities

Each year, as part of the Environmental Studies Senior Seminar, members of the class perform an “environmental audit” of Macalester College. Pairs of students analyze issues such as campus paper use, energy consumption and food waste (to name only a few), documenting their findings in efforts to promote increased environmental accountability by the college.

Beyond investigating resource use and consumption patterns, however, it is important to situate these findings within the overarching views and attitudes of the larger campus community. We must question how students, faculty and staff feel about environmental issues on campus, and whether the concern exists to back the increased accountability called for by projects such as the environmental audit.

In order to respond to this line of inquiry, we performed a representative survey of Macalester students, faculty and staff to assess what issues the Macalester community is most concerned about. We have incorporated this project as part of the class’s audit, hoping to get a sense of how environmentally oriented and aware this campus really is, and how motivated people might be to work towards increased environmental accountability in the future. Below, you will find a detailed discussion of how we conducted this survey, as well as extensive documentation of our results.

We designed our survey to reach a representative population of the entire Macalester community, to encourage a broad range of responses from participants, and to limit response bias contributed by interviewers. Approximately 10% of the 2, 318 total students, faculty, and staff on campus were interviewed in our study, yielding a total of 200 respondents included in the final results. As every respondent was asked to give three answers for each of the three survey questions, 600 total responses are reported for each question.

In order to assure that the respondents comprised a representative sampling of the Macalester community, surveys were given to a random sample of a pre-determined population. Population distribution is summarized in the tables below:

Distribution of Respondents by Gender
‘01 women	12
‘01 men	18
‘02 women	18
‘02 men	20
‘03 women	17
‘03 men	24
‘04 women	15
‘04 men	28

male faculty	10
female faculty	8

male staff	12
female staff	18

Respondents were randomly chosen from groups of students, faculty and staff found in Olin-Rice, Old Main, Carnegie, Weyerhaeuser, the Campus Center, the Lampert Building, and around campus on the chapel lawn and Shaw field during four afternoon interview sessions. When a quota of a given group identified above had been reached, responses from people in those categories were no longer considered and the next respondent was identified.

In order to encourage broad and unbiased responses, three open-ended questions were posed to respondents. The questions are as follows:

In order to eliminate bias, the respondents did not see the survey, but were asked to verbally respond to the questions. This was done to avoid having respondents look ahead in the survey and be influenced by the phrase “environmental concern” in question three. Additionally, an effort was made to select students, faculty, and staff who did not know the surveyors as environmental studies majors.

The results of our survey are illustrated in the graphs below. In order to simplify our results, we assigned each response to one of several broader categories listed along the x-axis.

Question 1: What are the three most important issues that need to be addressed on campus?

Question 2: What are the most important issues that you are concerned with in the larger community or the world in general (or that Macalester should be concerned with)?

Question 3: What are the most important environmental issues that Macalester needs to address?

We will now turn to a discussion of our survey results. In response to question 1 (regarding the most pressing issues to be addressed on campus), issues of diversity (a category which included responses focused on race, multicultural, gender and GLBT issues) ranked highest among all three groups (students, faculty and staff). This finding is not surprising considering the ongoing campus debate around support for multicultural issues and programming. These issues are frequently covered in campus publications such as the Mac Weekly, as well as addressed by student groups and increasingly by the administration. Other common responses to question 1 centered around the need for increased student voice in campus decision making, and problems with campus infrastructure (i.e. housing, advising and funding).

While paling in comparison to responses in other major categories, environmental issues were cited to some degree by all groups. Responses regarding environmental concerns comprised 52 of a total of 600 responses to this question. The highest relative percentage of responses came from Macalester faculty who found environmental issues somewhat more pressing than campus infrastructure.

In response to question 2 (regarding the most pressing issues in the community or world at large), environmental concern ranked much higher on the response list. Environmental concerns fell second only to issues of social justice and inequality overall, and for both students and faculty. However, staff responses ranked environmental issues as only the fourth most pressing category of concern. The most frequently cited community or global environmental concerns included global warming, pollution, depletion of the ozone layer, and rainforest conservation. It was interesting to us that respondents seemed to consider the environment a pressing concern when looking off campus, but were not as immediately aware of environmental problems within the Macalester community.

Finally, in response to question 3, responses varied between environmental issues to be addressed on campus and those Macalester needed to be concerned with more generally. Respondents citing off campus issues typically had trouble identifying on-campus issues, and resorted to more generic responses such as pollution or global warming. With regards to issues to be addressed on campus, paper waste was most often cited, followed by energy consumption and recycling of plastics. Important general issues included air pollution, protection of biodiversity, and increased political awareness on environmental issues. Faculty and staff seemed generally less concerned with on campus issues such as food or water waste, and more often cited the broader issues mentioned above.

In general, we noticed few disparities in total responses based on gender, years at Macalester or academic discipline. We did note, however, that Macalester staff (especially those not working closely with students), had a difficult time responding to questions 1 and 3, often basing their responses on perceptions of students drawn from the Mac Weekly or other young people they know. Faculty were also reluctant to think in depth about issues that might be addressed on campus, often giving little time or attention to survey questions.

In general, students, faculty and staff seemed to perceive environmental concerns as more of a global than a local issue. While social issues often took precedent over environmental concerns (particularly on campus) it is clear that a large percentage of the Macalester community demonstrated some level of environmental consciousness in their responses. This gives us some hope that environmental concerns are becoming a higher priority within the Macalester community (see Macalester Environmental Audit 2000), we also feel that personal and campus accountability for local environmental issues is lacking. This speaks to the need for increased campus activity and outreach regarding environmental issues. It is our hope that the outcome of this and other environmental studies programs will make this need apparent, and lead to positive action that will increase environmental accountability on campus.

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