The Eco League is a five-college consortium consisting of Alaska Pacific University, Green Mountain College, Northland College, Prescott College and College of the Atlantic. The consortium is unique, in that each college is in a different geographic area. Alaska Pacific University is in Anchorage, Alaska. It is the only college in an urban center. Prescott College is situated in Prescott, Arizona, making it the only southwestern campus. Northland, a Midwestern campus, is situated in Ashland, Wisconsin. Green Mountain College is in Poultney, Vermont, a small town situated in rural Vermont's Green Mountains. College of the Atlantic's ocean-front campus is situated on Mount Desert Island in Down East Maine, directly adjacent to Acadia National Park. Despite a wide variation in structure and culture, all five colleges have strong programs in Environmental Studies. The essential beauty of the consortium is the ability to experience learning in virtually every major biome of the United States.
The Eco League was created in response to a student call for improved academic collaboration and mobility related to issues of sustainability. This call was first articulated by students at Prescott College who in 1996 founded the North American Alliance for Green Education (NAAGE), an earlier consortium and non-profit founded by students at Prescott College in collaboration with other students, faculty and administrators at Antioch College, Audubon Expedition Institute, College of the Atlantic, Green Mountain College, Naropa University, New College of California, Northland College, Sterling College, Unity College and Warren Wilson College. The student exchange system developed by NAAGE leaders and negotiated over several years with stakeholders at each institution was later adopted by the EcoLeague.
Famous quotes containing the words eco and/or league:
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best—it’s all they’ll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money—provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don’t need it.”
—Peter De Vries (b. 1910)