bookreviews 292 College & Research Libraries May 1999 of them sermons and satires intended to press an agenda on a more general audi ence than Caesar seems to envision for his work. In a land where an astonishingly large proportion of the population com pletes undergraduate and graduate edu cation and where the public cost of main taining institutions of higher education is considerable, constant debate about the goals and direction of these institutions is to be expected. Along with more impas sioned attempts to influence that direc tion, there is place for more modest re flections from a thoughtful academic who thinks a lot about the implications of the rejection letters and memos that many of us thoughtlessly toss into the trash (some times unread) and who, Ishmael-like, feels November in his soul.—George R. Keiser, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas. Creighton, Sarah Hammond. Greening the Ivory Tower: Improving the Environmen tal Track Record of Universities, Colleges, and Other Institutions. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pr., 1998. 337p. $25, alk. pa per (ISBN 0262531518). LC 97-39382. Many of us who work in universities have been attracted by the thought that our work consists of doing the right thing rather than amassing wealth (the salaries of major administrators notwithstanding), and we believe our work’s goal is ulti mately to increase the health, wisdom, and genuine wealth of the larger commu nity. Many of us, for similar reasons, have committed ourselves to environmental amelioration, and have become focused on, say, deforestation in tropical wetlands, or fossil fuel burning in an upwind state, or land development down the road from home. A concern less apparent to us, however, may lie within the academic enclave in which we labor. The university is an insti tution, and like all physical institutions, it impacts the environment. In proportion to their size and intensity, our academic institutions have negative effects on the biosphere, sometimes startlingly huge ef fects. Creighton notes that Tufts Univer sity uses more electricity than any other business served by the region’s electrical generating company. When the venerable environmentalist Pete Seeger was asked recently, “What is the most important thing to do for the environment?” his re sponse was terse: “Act locally.” Those of us in the university—faculty and staff and managers—who would act locally in our workplace must change an immense number of day-to-day technical opera tions, a lengthy, tedious process. Greening the Ivory Tower is a handbook for carrying out that process, and it would seem invaluable. Though it includes ex periences from a variety of institutions, the book is based on work accomplished at Tufts University through a research program (“Tufts CLEAN!”) begun in 1990 with a grant from the federal Environ mental Protection Agency. The author was project manager of Tufts CLEAN! and now works in the Massachusetts Division of Capital Planning and Operations. Her book provides comprehensive informa tion for performing what has come to be known as an “environmental audit” of a university. The first step of an audit is to discover quantity and type of resource use, along with quantity and type of waste generated. These data provide a basis for planning reductions and changes in tech nologies. After that comes implementing the plan for “greening” the campus. The audience to which Greening the Ivory Tower is addressed, writes Creighton, are people who “are interested and moti vated to help green their campuses but have little or no experience with chang ing institutions or with the technologies that are needed to accomplish the task.” To serve such an audience, the handbook must be basic, comprehensive, detailed, and accessible. This book meets all of these criteria. Although dealing with highly technical issues, it systematically presents basic information on how universities function and how their functioning may be changed. The first section of the book is a primer on university structure and dynamics. The descriptions are peppered with insights easily overlooked: the ten dency to overgather data coupled with Book Reviews 293 the disinclination for action; the some times ephemeral effect of student activ ism, as the student body comes and goes; the power of top administration to sup port or stymie meaningful change. Such insights are inevitably accompanied by savvy suggestions for facilitating change. Subsequent action-oriented chapters, the heart of the book, deal with “Buildings & Grounds,” “Purchasing,” “Dining Ser vices,” “Labs,” and “Academic Depart ments.” These provide a veritable cornu copia of techniques for reducing con sumption and waste. The book’s detailed suggestions remind us that changing in stitutional behaviors may be difficult. The tone might be called “realistic optimism”: brisk and encouraging, neither whiny nor self-important, always hopeful that some thing out of the compendium will work for you. The closing chapter returns to the over all task of “Greening the Ivory Tower.” It offers a set of “lessons” learned in the Tufts experience. These lessons, like the sugges tions for technical change, seem level headed and practical. “Environmental Stewardship Almost Always Means Re ducing Waste” is a lesson that might well be posted near your and my department photocopier. “Take Action Where You Can Be Successful” rings true to anyone who has labored as an environmental advocate beyond a single issue. “Never Take No for an Answer ” indicates a resiliency evi denced in this handbook’s wealth of al ternatives. Despite its length (nearly 300 pages), Greening the Ivory Tower should prove ac cessible to its audience. It is well orga nized, richly documented with graphics illustrating its technical recommenda tions, charted by a good index, and supplemented by an extensive bibliogra phy. Most important, it is well written: clear and succinct, composed with strong topic sentences, clear headers, logical or ganization, and few digressions. Those ex perienced in environmental advocacy might anticipate long, sad, ironic anec dotes, but this practical book manages to slip them between the lines (the manager in charge of watering athletic fields, we are told, had perfected a “water cannon” technique over many years and was not about to change). The theme of student involvement is the focus of a chapter on “Student Activi ties” and, indeed, is interwoven through out the book, but the point of view is not primarily that of students. A brief, but use ful, discussion of curricula outlines the need for interdisciplinarity—successfully introduced into Tufts ES programs by Tony Cortese—and also discusses David Orr ’s more basic questions about the goals of education. Those interested in peda gogy should read Cortese and Orr; those interested in changing the institution’s business behaviors should order Greening the Ivory Tower, display it in the library, and recommend it to colleagues. When I recently commenced my course in environmental advocacy, I posed one of those first-day-of-class ques tions, one of the few I felt I could answer with certainty: “What is the most impor tant characteristic of the environmental advocate who succeeds over the long term?” My answer remains “the one with a good heart.” Sarah Hammond Creighton’s book has a good heart and might lend good heart to its readers.— Vernon Owen Grumbling, University of New England, Biddeford, Maine. The Eighth Off-Campus Library Services Con ference Proceedings: Providence, RI, April 22–24, 1998. Comp. P. Steven Thomas and Maryhelen Jones. Mount Pleasant, Mich.: Central Michigan Univ., 1998. 350p. $45. The Eighth Off-Campus Library Services Con ference Proceedings consists of papers pre sented at the conference held in April 1998. Papers are arranged alphabetically by author name, and cover the gamut of topics and issues involved with provid ing library services to off-campus and dis tance-learning students. In addition, this volume of proceedings of the Off-Cam pus Library Services Conference includes the tables of contents for the previous seven proceedings. These tables of con