Barriers to Sustainable Universities and Ways Forward: A Canadian students` Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While efforts to integrate Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) at universities have been increasing, said integration has not been occurring fast enough to counteract the unbalanced nature of humanity’s interactions with the planet. A number of studies have delved into the possible barriers slowing this progress and incentives to increasing sustainability initiatives on campus, but rarely have they included the student perspective. This knowledge gap was addressed as part of a study that utilized semi-structured interviews and concept checklists with 27 Canadian university students’ unions’ presidents to investigate their conceptualizations of sustainable development and sustainable universities. Thematic analysis utilizing an inductive approach was employed to discover key themes. While a number of themes emerged, one that was overarching as a general concern and both a barrier and incentive to a more sustainable university was university finances. This in turn is connected to students through enrolment and recruitment efforts as tuition represents a large proportion of university budgets. Participants believed students hold the greatest ability of all university stakeholders to promote sustainability on their campuses and when combined with their ability to impact university finances, the possible impact of empowered students to initiate change for more sustainable campuses is great. In order to harness this energy, this study makes recommendations to further enable students to engage with and mobilize their university campuses and stakeholders. Even potential students could influence universities by demanding deeper commitments to sustainability. This research contributes to scholarly research by presenting the perspectives of an understudied, yet important, university stakeholder group regarding factors influencing campus sustainability and recommendations for student empowerment. This research was part of a larger SSHRC-funded study investigating university stakeholders’ conceptualizations of sustainable development, sustainable universities and the role of universities in the journey towards a more sustainable future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".