Cal Poly Humboldt
AC-1: Academic Courses

In 2013, a committee called the Sustainability Steering Committee was convened to determine which courses should receive sustainability course designations. This committee consisted of primarily faculty and staff and determined that sustainability-focused courses must concentrate on all three concepts of sustainability, including social, economic, and environmental dimensions; sustainability-related courses would integrate social or economic issues with environmental dimensions of sustainability. The group then did a keyword search of course descriptions in the HSU catalog, using 42 search terms, chosen to relate to the three dimensions of sustainability: environmental, economic, and social (search terms included: forest*, ecosystem*, energ*, econom*, financ*, justic*, socio*, politic*, communit*, etc.) An initial list of courses whose titles or descriptions contained search terms from at least two dimensions was refined with a course-by-course examination of catalog descriptions. The committee then published a draft list to department chairs, asking for confirmation, additions, and/or subtractions from the lists. After reconciling the revisions, all courses that had received a sustainability designation were marked in the course catalog and made public to students in the Fall of 2013. During 2016, the Office of Sustainability simply did a count of courses that had received sustainability designations previously and that were offered during the 2015-2016 academic year. In order to determine whether any new courses that should be given a sustainability focused or related course designation, the Office of Sustainability then determined which courses were new since the first 2013 designation process, and repeated the keyword search on these courses. Courses with keywords in the course title or description were then vetted by the Office of Sustainability and a small committee of faculty. A list of confirmed courses will be sent to department chairs for final approval. It is anticipated that new designations will be added to the course catalog published for academic year 2018-2019 because the timeliness of this process did not meet catalog deadlines for updating the 2017-2018 catalog, and accordingly, have not been shown in the data represented here.

Total number of courses was taken from a catalog query provided by the Registrar's office that included all courses listed in Fall 2015 and Spring 2016. Duplicates (courses listed in both semesters) were removed to get the total number of courses figure listed above (i.e. courses listed in both semesters were counted only one time). Sustainability focused and related courses were also counted over Fall 2015 and Spring 2016, with a course offered in both semesters counted once.