www.insidehighered.com: Carnegie Mellon University may be the first university to conduct a review of how its teaching, research and practices align with the United Nations-adopted sustainable development goals.
The review attempts to map how the university's varied activities align with each of the 17 SDGs, also known as the Global Goals, which focus on elimination of poverty and hunger, environmental sustainability and climate action, access to clean water, gender equality, quality education, and other areas.
11 comments:
Anytime I see Carnegie Mellon in a headline, it piques my interest, especially when in reference to achieving goals for inclusion and bettering the university. This article covers the pursuit by Carnegie Mellon to help achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) laid forth by the UN. I was generally aware that a kind of structure like this existed, but I would not have been able to name where the goals came from, or any of the specific goals. This general mystery surrounding the topic is brought up, where in a questionnaire to the student body, students are asked if they are aware of the 17 SDGs, and only half of the student population say that they were. It is refreshing to learn that while I may not have been aware of the details, I am still in some way participating, and by bringing this topic to light I am hoping that I can find even more direct and impactful ways to contribute to the cause, thanks to the opportunities available to me.
Like Charles, I am also drawn to any article that has Carnegie in the headline. It took me a second reading to understand what this article was talking about. I know that the school does do work to make the campus more sustainable and do better to follow the UN guidelines but to see that we are also doing follow up work to see how well we are doing at this task is good to see. I also like the point that the student body only partially had an idea of the work being done. I know when I filled out the survey I had no idea what they were talking about. I hope the school as a whole continues on this path of making the location more sustainable and being an example to other universities that may be trying to do the same.
It's great to hear that Carnegie Mellon is taking charge about this kind of stuff. Powerful American organizations and institutions are not known for publicly standing up to care about global issues, especially involving the environment, so this is definitely a step in the right direction. However, I always feel a bit cynical about these types of things. Carnegie Mellon stands up for gender equality, but does not implement gender neutral bathrooms in every building to make trans students feel safer? They put out a statement on anti-racism while hiring appointing a known racist to a position of power? It truly does not feel right to me. It feels a little bit likely performative activism even seeing from the short time I have been here that the school's policies on things like changing your name and gender marker are superficial, and not built with a trans perspective. i just hope that CMU actually carries through with these promises.
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are not something I had ever heard about until reading this article; seeing CMU being a leading university in reviewing how we align with those goals is really interesting, and a positive thing. The SDGs range from climate actions, to gender equity and other inequality issues, to food scarcity, and peace and justice. CMU had more activity related to education, economic growth, and reduced inequalities. I think this makes sense (as did the authors of the study), because CMU is an educational institution which employs a large number of people. The SDG on reduced inequalities was found to be related to over 50 courses at CMU last spring. As I mentioned earlier, awareness in the student body about the SDGs and how they are in action at our school is minimal. The study found 56% of the students who took a survey did not know what SDGs are, but more than half were interested in more information. It will be interesting to see how this progresses, and now awareness on campus about SDGs changes (or doesn’t) in the coming years.
I am really happy that Carnegie Mellon is taking the very essential step in aligning itself with the UN's sustainable development goals (SDGs). The SDGs that the UN put out happen to include a focus on elimination of poverty and hunger, environmental sustainability and climate action, access to clean water, gender equality, and quality of education. I must say that i have to agree with Jem on the fact that although this is a step in the right direction for Carnegie Mellon, it can be interpreted ad performative activism because of all they ways they are hypocritical with their policies. I think that it is up to the students to hold the university accountable to the promises they make to align to the SDGs, especially in terms of implementing gender neutral bathrooms in every single building and actually implementing policies that show that black lives matter, not some empty statement
To think that CMU may be the first university to consider and voluntarily take steps towards the UN's sustainable development goals, or SDGs, both brings about a sense of pride but also some negative emotion as well. College campuses are large groups of people that contribute to society in a great multitude of ways, so hearing that in the past 5 years of the SDG's existence, CMU is the only college to review them, is an interesting fact. While it is great to pat ourselves on the back for how well we're doing, I think it's important to look at this article in the light of what others are not doing. Sustainability has become more and more of an alarming topic as the years have gone by, so (hopefully) it is only a matter of time until other schools catch on. Another important thing to bring up is that this is only a review. A review does not necessarily imply that the school will begin to actually change their policies based on what was found within it. We, as a community, could only hope that CMU is taking the proper steps to coordinate a good response as a reaction to what was found within the review of the SDGs.
I think it is a very good step that CMU is taking steps towards the UN's sustainable development goals. I do hope other colleges take this step since these guidelines have been released since 2015 and I do think it is sad that no other college has taken steps towards these goals. I personally had never heard of these UN goals and that is very surprising to me as our society has been very vocal about sustainability. I also thought it was very surprising that around fifty- six percent of CMU students also were not aware of the sustainability goals as well. I do think that this article has not made it very clear how CMU plans on acting on these sustainability goals and how they will be held accountable. I do think CMU needs to release precise and detailed plans on how they will meet each one of these goals. I also think they should send out recommendations for their students to follow as that can actually make a difference in the meeting of these goals. I applaud CMU for reviewing these goals and wanting to take action however I want to see these actions put in place as soon as it can be.
I frankly had no idea that Carnegie Mellon was so committed to sustainable practices. Although it is completely unheard of for universities to find out if they are following the regulations set forth by the United Nations, I think it is a great way to compare from university to university how each of them might impact our future. I am not surprised that many people did not know that Carnegie Mellon University was trying to commit to the United Nations Global Goals but I think if they had given this a bit more exposure, for example, a school-wide email, this would be brought to more people’s attention. I think in the community as a whole, it is a shared value that we are fully sustainable and I am glad that Carnegie Mellon University has decided to try and uphold us to the very standards that the rest of the world strives to achieve.
I already knew that CMU was very dedicated to sustainability and innovating its practices moving forward, but I had no idea that such a comprehensive review was in progress. What I also found interesting was that a large part of this initial review was done using an artificial intelligence algorithm. Personally, I see that as a major indicator of just how committed the university is to its mission of promoting sustainability. Before now, I didn't know too much about the SDGs, much less what they were all about. However, similarly to how Hiniker described it, knowing that our current curriculum and programs already follow many of these goals gives me much more motivation to learn more and to pursue further growth in these categories for the university. I also find the fact the CMU may be the first university to conduct such a comprehensive internal review to be very inspiring, since it only helps to reinforce one of the many reasons I was drawn to attend.
I am always drawn a little whenever I see Carnegie Mellon in headlines. I particularly like reading about Carnegie Mellon in an article that is not produced by the university. This article actually taught me about the 17 global initiatives that the United Nations adopted in 2015. Reading the Provosts statement regarding awareness of what is happening on campus I think exemplifies Carnegie Mellon's greatest strength and biggest weakness. As a University, Carnegie Mellon has seemed to be very open to the idea of not always knowing 100% of what is going on. This allows for faculty and students to conduct research without having to deal with the bureaucratic formalities through the university, however, this also makes the job of the university harder when it comes to sustainability efforts and analysis. After reading this article, I think I will have a sharper eye for sustainability on campus and sustainability within my projects for classes and in my personal life.
I think this is a public relations campaign to make Carnegie Mellon look like their practices are beyond ethical question. It seems to be a quantitative assessment trying to find out what is the volume of work done that relates to the various Sustainable Development Goals. I noticed that the article described SDG 11 as being about sustainable cities. According to the SDG website, the goal is “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.” It is fairly widely known that CMU is developing predictive policing tools, which are inherently racist, and they have other military and police research and development contracts. I would argue that predictive policing, as an individual research topic, is qualitatively incredibly damaging. The folks who are doing the assessment “make no claim for comprehensiveness,” which reinforces my feeling that this is no more than an exercise to conceal the real problems that CMU has.
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