Update from Dr. Denny

On Friday, I had a chance meeting with Danny Pugh, Vice Provost and Dean of Students, and asked him about the survey. I was concerned that our doing the survey could lead people to believe the policy was getting ready to change and that could have a negative impact on enrollments next fall. Dean Pugh said that as long as we made it clear it was a class project there would be no problem, but he also suggested that such a driving ban was not likely to happen. He said that earlier, maybe 10 years ago, a similar ban was suggested and it got a strong "push-back" from state legislators. Also he said that part of the indebtedness on the new parking decks assumed that freshmen would be paying to park there.

So, I called Nick Brown back and suggested a more general survey of UA students that examined a variety of sustainability behaviors including transportation, recycling, and energy use. He liked the idea, so we'll move that direction.

I googled "Student Survey Sustainability" and got a lot of hits (about 227,000). My first hit was for a survey done at St. Andrew's in the UK that illustrates the types of questions we could ask, including comparisons by year in school (p. 3):  http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/media/Findings%20of%20Student%20Sustainability%20Survey.pdf

So for tonight's class, think about other general areas of sustainability where we might survey students at the U of A about their current behaviors. Transportation, recycling, and energy use were the areas that came immediately to my mind. Do you have other areas?