DETROIT — In front of the crowd of about 200 business, government and academic leaders at a Detroit Economic Club luncheon at the Westin Book Cadillac Hotel and a live webcast audience, University President Mary Sue Coleman and Andrew Liveris, chairman and executive officer of The Dow Chemical Company, announced a new partnership between the University and Dow.
The program, titled the Dow Sustainability Fellows Program at U-M, strives to use academic collaboration to examine and solve sustainability issues and offers a unique fellowship for nearly 300 master’s, doctoral and postdoctoral students from a variety of academic disciplines at the University.
In her address, Coleman said the program will create 300 “new leaders” from business, engineering, law, public policy and other fields. She explained that the multidisciplinary nature of the fellowship will allow the program to efficiently craft sustainable initiatives.
“The uniqueness of this program is that it is not rooted in one discipline,” Coleman said. “It is as broad and comprehensive as sustainability is itself. And frankly, I believe it is the only one to solve the problems as pervasive as the ones that we are facing in protecting our natural world.”
The new fellowship will be funded with the help of a $10-million gift from Dow over a period of six years. The Midland, Mich.-based chemical company creates chemicals and plastics.
Liveris explained that though Dow has already integrated sustainability into business, the collaboration with the University and other groups is necessary to develop efficient and sustainable strategies that can be implemented worldwide.
“We recognize that no one industry — and certainly no one company — can solve these challenges alone,” Liveris said. “They’re too big, they’re too global, and they’re too urgent … History tells us that if we have a chance at solving anything, then we need to pull our collective creativity together.”
Coleman said the 300 students in the fellowship will address issues she referred to as “the wicked problems,” meaning the most difficult environmental issues such as energy, water and land use and human behavior. Coleman claims that the program will bring more sustainability scholars, who are dedicated to making an impact in these issues, to campus.
Coleman added that the fellows in the Dow program will have access to the many sustainability tools that the University already offers, including the $1.25-billion University research portfolio and more than 670 faculty members with sustainability expertise. The program will also work alongside the already established Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute, the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, the Michigan Energy Institute and the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University, according to Coleman.
At a press conference after the announcement, Don Scavia, director of the Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute at the University, explained that applications for the program will be accepted next fall, and the fellows will begin in January 2013.
Scavia said the Dow fellowship will provide more graduate students with the opportunity to work in fields with an emphasis in sustainability, since the Graham Institute’s existing doctoral fellowship program only admits six students annually.
“(It) is way over subscribed,” Scavia said of the doctoral fellowship program. “We’re only bringing in six students a year, and we’re getting 70 applications a year, so we expect a lot of attention. (The new program) will be the largest program focused on sustainability (on campus).”
The master’s sustainability fellow program will last one year while the doctoral and postdoctoral fellows will take two years to complete.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily after the event, Coleman said she is excited to further develop the relationship between the University and Dow, noting that the partnership began several years ago when Dow assisted the University in enhancing sustainability on campus.
“They’ve been out front as a corporation doing some really innovative projects and they’ve just become a wonderful partner,” Coleman said. “We’ve been working with them now for a number of years, and we think it’s a very good public-private partnership, and I hope we can develop more of these.”
Though Liveris emphasized the current sustainable practices of Dow in his announcement of the new program, the chemical company has been connected with past incidents of environmental harm. According to the Environmental Protection Agency web site, the Dow facility in Michigan has been held responsible for contributing to rising dioxin levels in the Titabawassee River — which flows primarily in the southeastern region of the state — and its adjacent flood plains.
However, the company has recently worked with the EPA to develop a strategy to clean up the Midland area.
Dow has also had a long-time affiliation with the development of chemicals for warfare, including napalm and Agent Orange, which were used during the Vietnam War. In response to these past incidents, Coleman said she believes Dow and other corporations have moved toward a more sustainable model.
“I think all industries in this country have really been waking up to environmental responsibility,” Coleman said. “It turns out that Dow has been very aggressive in this area … They recognize at the very top of the organization and throughout the organization how important this is for the future.”
In the press conference, Neil Hawkins, vice president of sustainability and environment, health & safety for Dow, recognized the company’s past incidents of environmental harm and said the company, and its sustainability practices, have evolved.
“As Dow grew and expanded, that’s when chemistry and chemical engineering was explored and practiced for the first time, so undoubtedly, things did occur during that time,” Hawkins said. “I think the key thing is we’re very responsibly dealing with any of those legacies while making sure moving forward that we’re practicing the very best environmental practices.”
Berry Kennedy, an MBA student in environmental sciences through the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, and Rackham student Laura Sherman, a current Graham doctoral fellow, were selected to answer questions on the panel alongside Liveris and Coleman at the event.
In an interview afterward, Kennedy said she will be eligible for the program and plans to apply in the fall, adding that she hopes more students will appreciate the well-established sustainability movement at the University in light of the new fellowship.
“A lot of students don’t realize the University of Michigan is actually a leader in the country in sustainability, so it’s already something that is attracting top students and really setting the University apart,” Kennedy said. “But I think (the Dow program) is going to make it even stronger and make this the place to go for sustainability.”
Kennedy added that Dow heavily recruits from the Ross School of Business, and the chemical currently employs over 300 University alums.
“I think we have a good view of it as a company that is really trying to make advances (in sustainability), and it is positively perceived. I see it as a great fit,” Kennedy said.
The Dow program will be evaluated regularly throughout its six years of operation and will have the opportunity to be renewed in 2018.