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The Daily Northwestern Thursday, November 8, 2012
DAILYNORTHWESTERN.COM
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In Focus
Sustaining NU University tries to coordinate disparate groups By LAUREN CARUBA
daily senior staffer
On the last day of summer, Northwestern’s class of 2016 lounged on Deering Meadow during the first annual Deering Days Welcome BBQ. To freshmen, it may have just seemed like a relaxing end to Wildcat Welcome, with rapper Chet Haze performing and plenty of free food. But the barbecue held a deeper significance as NU’s first-ever “zero waste” event. Students at the barbecue disposed of their waste at composting and recycling stations, and water filling stations cut down on plastic bottle usage. The event generated about 500 pounds of compostable material and only 3 or 4 pounds of waste, said Weinberg junior Ani Ajith, a main organizer of the event. In many ways, the Wildcat Welcome finale signified an increasingly motivated sustainability movement: Deering Days was fueled largely by student initiative but augmented by support from Sodexo, Associated Student Government, NU Student Affairs and the Office of Sustainability. Still, it is difficult to gauge the
effectiveness of NU’s sustainability movement, which has been characterized by disjointed initiatives and ineffective communication with the broader student body. In the year since its creation, the Office of Sustainability has worked to improve collaboration between the We all administrawish that we tion, ASG and student could just flip the groups hopswitch and dising to create a greener mantle this giant NU. Regardless, many food complex ... not directly but we can’t. involved in Paige Humecki, the push nuCuisine remain sustainability uninformed intern about the University’s environmental efforts.
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A holistic approach, fragmented “Sustainability is very broad,” nuCuisine sustainability intern Paige Humecki
Associated Student Government
said. “There’s a lot of different meanings to the word and different components of being sustainable.” At a university like NU, that broad definition can be applied unevenly. NuCuisine’s sustainability efforts encompass energy and waste reduction as well as locally sourced foods, the McCormick sophomore said. Other NU departments have focused on things such as building sustainability certification, whereas sustainability minded student groups target everything from green engineering to to recycling. Until recently, many of NU’s sustainability initiatives have been concentrated at the administrative level. The University currently invests about $30 million in energy-saving projects across its two campuses, said Rob Whittier, who became NU’s first sustainability director last November. By purchasing renewable energy certificates at local wind farms, ensuring Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification for construction projects and installing solar panels on the Ford Motor Company Engineering Design Center, NU has become a top green energy user. However, with more than a dozen
environmental initiatives across campus, NU’s proliferation of sustainability-related organizations can be overwhelming. The movement has been characterized by poor overall direction and administrative engagement, Whittier said.
Communication begets cohesion When
University
» See IN FOCUS, page 8
DAILY DECISION
Youth vote decisive in 2012 Americans under 30 the determining factor in battleground states
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One can really say that the youth vote gave Obama the election. Kenneth Janda, political science professor
By PATRICK SVITEK
daily senior staffer
Mariam Gomaa/Daily Senior Staffer
SENATE SEATS Associated Student Goverment’s Ani Ajith, Victor Shao, David Harris, Jane Gilmore and Alex Van Atta discuss last month’s campus lightwalk.
ASG pursues NU Day, extended dining hours By STEPHANIE HAINES
daily senior staffer
Associated Student Government voted Wednesday to allocate $1,000 to help fund Northwestern Day at Chicago’s United Center, an idea that had been in the works in a few meetings leading up to the senate meeting. The funding will come from the Senate Project Pool and will assist the Center for Student Involvement in the planning of this event.
The dates suggested for the NU Day at the United Center include Jan. 7, the day students return from winter break, and March 31, which falls during spring break. Although the dates of the NU Day at the United Center remain unclear, the senate voted on an amendment to ask CSI to change the dates to be more accommodating to students. Two new business items were moved to old business and passed. This was so
Serving the University and Evanston since 1881
» See ASG, page 8
Northwestern students may have woken up Wednesday morning to President-elect Mitt Romney if it were not for their peers’ votes, according to exit polls in Tuesday’s presidential contest. Early estimates pin youth turnout at just under half of the nearly 23 million young adults registered to vote in the United States. Together, those young people contributed one in five votes this election season. So, how critical was the youth vote? Enough to push President Barack Obama over the finish line in four battleground states, according to an electoral analysis released Wednesday by the Center for Research and Information on Civic Learning and Engagement. The Tufts University think tank found that Obama could have lost Ohio, Florida, Virginia and Pennsylvania if registered voters aged 18 to 29 stayed home on Election Day. That batch of swing states made up 80 electoral votes that could have
Mariam Gomaa/Daily Senior Staffer
STAR-SPANGLED President Barack Obama greets supporters at McCormick Place in Chicago.
been decisive even if Romney nabbed only half of them. When asked to explain how crucial young people were in Tuesday’s election, NU political science Prof. Kenneth Janda shared an info graphic showing that 3 in 5 registered voters aged 18 to 24 cast their ballot for Obama. “One can really say that the youth vote gave Obama the election,” Janda
concluded in an email to The Daily. University of Wisconsin-Madison Prof. Constance Flanagan, an expert in youth attitudes and beliefs, said young voters are as “practical as anybody else” and often do not need glossy promises or a hope-and-change savior to turn out en masse. “It was a big surprise because it was predicted over and over again that they wouldn’t come out and they had no enthusiasm compared to 2008,” she said. “They proved basically all the pundits wrong.” In his victory speech early Wednesday morning at McCormick Place in Chicago, Obama acknowledged his supporters’ youthfulness while addressing cynical claims that the election cycle seemed “small, even silly.” “But if you ever get the chance to talk to folks who turned out at our rallies and crowded along in a rope line in a high school gym, or saw folks working late in a campaign office in some tiny county far away from » See ELECTION, page 7
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