Governors will wish to ensure that their institution’s facilities and infrastructure are being effectively managed, specifically security, transport, parking, waste management and utilities and energy.
Security is a problem in higher education. Traditionally institutions have been very open, and control of visitors (or even of staff and students) is difficult without changing the culture. Few institutions would be happy isolating themselves from their surrounding communities. Indeed, the trend is in the other direction. But institutions are susceptible to theft, ranging from serious planned thefts of equipment (mostly computer hardware) amounting to thousands of pounds, to the supposedly victimless crime when someone helps themselves to small items of property. So pressures for increased security have grown. Similar pressures arise from health and safety concerns about ensuring that access to laboratories containing dangerous substances is adequately controlled.
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In terms of minimising environmental impact, the issue of transport also has to be considered by a governing body. It is now more than 30 years since Clerk Kerr (as President of the University of California) gave his famous definition of a university as a "series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking", but transport remains contentious in many institutions. There are at least two significant issues for a governing body: travel and transport policy, and car parking.
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Parking is a topic that can stir heated debate. Few institutions have sufficient capacity to allow everyone who wants to park on campus to do so, and this inevitably leads to debates about priorities. A few elements are happily uncontroversial (eg priority for those with mobility problems), but other than that there are issues including: the priority - if any - to be given to staff relative to students; the categories of user that should be permitted to park; parking priorities related to issues such as safety, unsocial hours and so on. The problem with such debates is not that there is no validity to them, but that they are normally advanced with little or no evidence. In addition, there is the issue of car parking charges, with arguments about whether different payment rates should be required of different categories of user or those with different levels of income. Overall, there is little chance of devising a solution that will not cause resentment somewhere, and the best that can be hoped for is a least bad solution. At the final decision point, governors will inevitably have some involvement, but they are best advised to see this as an area for management.
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Waste management is an area of increasing regulation involving waste disposal, storage, recycling and transportation. Institutions have to deal not only with the sort of waste associated with a residential or commercial activity, but also with biological and radioactive waste, 'sharps' (syringes etc) and other materials that require special treatment. So pressures are increasing to reduce waste, increase recycling and minimise hazard, all a challenge. Ideally, a governing body should have approved a waste management policy addressing not only legal compliance but the necessary information and training to spread good practice throughout the institution. As in other areas EMS data are available to compare institutional performance.
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What lies at the heart of sustainability from the point of view of the estate is the issue of minimising the adverse impact of an institution on the environment, and maximising the positive contribution it makes to a healthy environment. This is obviously partly a matter of controlling the consumption of utilities, carbon emissions, and waste. Even if institutions were not inclined to look at their use of utilities for reasons of sustainability, increasing fuel costs will prompt them to do so. But in fact, trying to reduce utilities costs has long been a reality, encouraged by many governing bodies. Effective procurement is obviously important, as is the issue of how utilities are managed. Many institutions have already introduced energy management systems which improve performance, yield savings and cover initial capital costs, often over a surprisingly short timescale. But the stakes are being raised the whole time. In addition to financial pressure there is now the imminent requirement on publicly funded bodies to reduce their carbon output
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