2025 Progress on Educational Experience 

Lehigh is committed to developing and empowering the next generation of Future Makers. By weaving sustainability into the very fabric of the university’s educational experience, we are preparing our students to address today’s complex challenges while proactively identifying opportunities for a more sustainable tomorrow. Through these immersive experiential learning opportunities, we arm our graduates with the essential skills required for the workforce of the future.

Sustainability is woven into the fabric of our curriculum and inquiry. As of 2025, 86% of academic departments offering courses offered sustainability-related coursework, and an astounding 97% of active research departments are engaged in sustainability-focused studies.

Academic Integration

Update: Progress has paused, and considerations are being made as to how and if this goal will continue to be pursued. By 2021, the Office of Sustainability had developed and finalized a College-Level Sustainability Framework, which was shared with the deans.

Update: Progress has paused, and considerations are being made as to how and if this goal will continue to be pursued. By 2021, sustainability-related learning outcomes were established in two of the five colleges: the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science and the College of Business. A working group was formed to develop updated learning outcomes for the College of Arts & Sciences. College of Education and College of Health, but progress was paused in 2023.

Update: The Office of Sustainability developed a new course inventory process in 2020-2021 that involved directly engaging with department chairs in each college. Since that time, other methods of identifying sustainability-related courses have been developed, which resulted in better identification of sustainability-related/focused courses. At the time of this reporting, 86% of academic departments with course offerings have at least 1 sustainability-related course. 

Update: The Office of Sustainability and the Lehigh Sustainability Council presented during the new faculty orientation in August 2021, and continued to do so annually on an intermittent basis until 2024, when, due to staffing constraints, the work was paused.

Update: The Office of Sustainability and Lehigh Sustainability Council started conducting Sustainability Literacy Assessments in spring 2020. These have been ongoing once a semester. The Office of Sustainability has identified gaps and is working to address them. 

Experiential Learning

Update: The Office of Creative Inquiry and the Office of Sustainability launched the Campus Sustainable Impact Fellowship in Spring 2021 with a cohort of students working on several campus sustainability projects. This fellowship program has been ongoing each year since then.

Update: The College of Arts & Sciences (CAS) supports students doing experiential learning in a variety of contexts. For example, CAS's new college curriculum also includes revamped Big Questions Seminars, all of which are interdisciplinary and many of which focus on issues related to the environment and sustainability. CAS funds hundreds of students to carry out research and experiential learning projects in the summer & during the academic year. One example of these grants is the Environmental Fellowships, which specifically funds students to do summer research in the areas of environment or sustainability. 

Update: We have developed a United Nations Youth Representative Leadership Development program that offers multiple experiential learning opportunities for more than 30 students throughout the entire academic year. The program culminates with Youth Representatives presenting their NGO related efforts/research at a UN conference.

Next Steps: This program will expand to include all of our LU/UN Partnership interns this coming year.

Research

Update: This effort has been merged with I-CPIE (Institute for Cyber-physical Infrastructure and Energy) in the College of Engineering. On the curricular side, Environmental Studies (undergraduate only), Earth & Environmental Science (both undergraduate and graduate), and Environmental Policy (graduate only), are academic programs with a sustainability and environmental focus.

Update: No renovation work at Building B has been approved at this time. The Lehigh Strategy and Campus Master Plan do not include a near-term investment related to this goal.

Update: Continued to support and expand. Progress included: 

  • Created a Libguide about open access and transformational agreements 
  • Creating a new position at Lehigh: Open Knowledge Librarian (in progress) 
  • Joined the HELIOS Open initiative together, with the Office of Research
  • Held an LVAIC Open Knowledge Symposium 
  • Continuing to support ORCID adoption
  • Continued to develop and update the library catalog (built in the open source VuFind) to enhance the searchability and discoverability of our collections. 
  • Continued to develop and update the open access Preserve (Lehigh's Institutional Repository built in the open source Islandora system). Added AI capabilities to automatically transliterate audio/visual materials.  
  • Work within Project ReShare, an open source, community-owned, interlibrary loan project on exploring digital and sharing of electronic and born-digital materials. 

Update: By 2022, added the value “Sustainability Effort” in the Scope field in Lyterati to provide a means for faculty to tag their research as this type of effort.