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The second Earth Summit renewed attention to sustainable development and environmental concerns worldwide; in our university, however, attention has been minimal. In response, several campus organizations collaborated to raise awareness on campus and in the local community by hosting a year‐long, nine‐event series of speakers and panels, each related to a chapter of Agenda 21. In addition to raising awareness among our constituency, we sought to increase our initiative's sustainability. Towards these ends, we developed 11 objectives, monitoring our success at achieving these objectives throughout the year by using surveys of participants, panelists, and collaborators. Here we reflect on the series’ impact based on evaluation analyses, and an assessment of how well we reached our goals. We close this paper with a discussion of our case study as a means to evolve sustainability interests at institutions of higher education into functional sustainability networks, initiatives and educational programs.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.