"By bringing the capacity of all students, staff and faculty together this [environmental efforts] can become much bigger," Vautin says.

Leaders of the initiative, like Vautin and Sharp, envision students and professors through GTC testing out academic environmental theories using the University as their laboratory. The lessons learned at Harvard could then be applied on a broader scale.

If this ideal is realized, then GTC could become a leading worldwide model of university environmentalism, Sharp says.

Sharp has qualifications that make her uniquely suited for this position. She worked for several years in Australia in such a position and spent the last year studying environmental practices of several dozen American and European universities. She began her work for Harvard in late March. She was offered the position after giving a presentation at Harvard last winter on her findings.

The nitty-gritty

The first component of GTC, the interest-free loan fund is essential to providing the schools with the money they need to undertake this new effort.

The loan would allow the individual schools to borrow money for up to five years from the GTC without interest to make building and other infrastructure environmentally friendly. The loans would be paid back by the savings realized from the reduction in utility costs from the improvements, according to Sharp.

Sharp says that often the major roadblock to undertaking environmentally beneficial projects is the up-front costs which must be made several years in advance of the savings from these changes. The loan fund would attempt to eliminate this barrier.