To educate exchange students to be systems thinkers (who do all the things stated below), and who are also systems managers, planners and designers who:

  • Embrace sustainability ethic; Design cities, building and sites to help build a sustainable future
  • Use ecological models to create and implement interconnected built-environment solutions
  • Embrace symbiosis; Design buildings, landscapes, and cities interconnected with systems
  • Plan and design in ways that build healthy ecosystems (healthy forests, clean rivers, productive soils)
  • Promote infrastructural systems including transportation that reduce emissions & preserve resources
  • Create and implement development frameworks – zero emissions, best practices, smart growth, green building, green sites -- that provision the sustain ability economy
  • Design built-sites as systems within systems with maximum integration among systems
  • Design built-site as integrated water-wastewater-energy-building-landscape system
  • Develop and promote the adoption of performance standards for cities, buildings, sites & built sites.
  • Design creatively to eliminate waste and reduce consumption.
  • Reduce total energy consumed (40% in US) and total electricity consumed (70% in US) by buildings
  • Reduce current 40% of CO2 produced in homes, offices and factories and 30% in transportation
  • Embrace the 2010 Initiative and the 2030 Challenge
  • Design net zero, smart¸ resource-efficient building and site design, materials, and systems.
  • Design for positive ecobalance and resource regeneration

Curriculum Goals

The primary goal of the Universities of the Future is to graduate students who can address the current and profound problems and can help society realize the opportunities inherent in addressing these problems. Student outcome objectives are to graduate students as:

Systems thinkers who:

  • Seek to solve today’s major interconnected systemic problems using systemic solutions
  • Understand that a healthy economy depends upon a healthy environment and healthy communities
  • Understand a healthy world is “impossible to quantify but also impossible to ignore” (Friedman 2008)
  • Use information, energy and money to promote sustainable resource /material flows.
  • Facilitate broad interdisciplinary definition of each region’s systemic challenges and opportunities
  • Are experts in working with local people to make their communities better places to live; and to see the necessity of a sustainability ethic and sustainability economy that promotes healthy ecosystems
  • Manage natural systems by managing people (so they see that QOL depends on healthy ecosystems)
  • Can build trust among diverse players essential for healthy collaborative partnerships
  • Are entrepreneurs who can implement change in local communities
  • Can motivate global funding to shift from market economy to sustainability economy
  • Make decisions based on the interconnectedness of living and non-living systems (development)
  • See development (cities, buildings, landscapes) as partner in regenerating healthy living systems
  • Are regional sustainability change agents who integrate diverse players—policymakers, investors, others—to empower people and save regional resources and ecosystems by:
    1. influencing national government policy,
    2. identifying regional economic opportunities,
    3. motivating private sector investors,
    4. working with local government,
    5. integrating local and global exerts, and
    6. developing initiatives to improve primary and secondary education
  • Replace linear, source-to-waste decisions with cyclical, cradle-to-cradle decisions
  • Have a conservation ethic and commitment to preserve resources and diversity
  • Partner with regenerative systems to build a sustainability economy
  • Replace dirty systems (fuel, production, building) with clean systems
  • See everything is food to plan and design zero-waste solutions
  • Teach society how to redefine our relation with the natural world
  • Teach people to make decisions based on full-cost accounting
  • Lead community-based efforts to preserve the resource base of the region
  • Facilitate regional economic and community development that sustainably harvests resources, adds value to those resources, keeps resources in community, and builds stronger communities
  • Replace economy of scale (maximize one thing) with economy of scope (optimize many things)
  • Innovate and implement integrated solution, using integrated technologies including IT and ET
  • In areas bypassed by the industrial economy, leapfrog directly into the sustainability economy
  • Bring disadvantaged people that ability to improve their lives and realize their aspirations
  • Know policies, regulations, and incentives that can move society to clean energy, efficiency, resource productivity, and conservation.