EASTON, Pa. — Live Green, Lafayette, the College's summer reading and orientation program, was featured in this week's edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Philadelphia Inquirer also featured the program in a recent article focusing on green initiatives at Philadelphia-area colleges and universities.

In addition, a harvest festival, brownbag discussions, and a documentary film on Sept. 10 and 12 continued the themes of sustainability and education begun on campus during the orientation for the Class of 2012.

In conjunction with the summer reading of The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, first-year students are participating in Corn on the Quad, an environmental sustainability project which includes three plots of corn planted by students, faculty, and staff at the center of campus.

The reading and related research projects have drawn upon a wide range of faculty interests across the sciences, engineering, humanities, and social sciences. Many professors will also use the book or issues from the book in various courses and First-Year Seminars throughout the school year.

The Chronicle article follows:

The corn was as high as an elephant's eye by the time the freshmen arrived at Lafayette College, in Easton, Pa., last month. Leafy stalks rustled in the breeze — a rural twist on the classic collegiate portrait.

"In one sense, it's public art," says Andy Smith, assistant professor and chair of the American-studies department, who helped nurture the crops all summer long, through early-morning hoeing sessions and worries about soggy ground and vermin. "It defamiliarizes something that we take for granted."

Incoming freshmen read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals over the summer, part of a larger focus on environmental ramifications of life at Lafayette. The first part of the book, which explores what Mr. Pollan calls "our national eating disorder," examines corn's central role in the American diet. By planting three plots of com on the campus, faculty and staff members hoped to get people thinking. "This is what an intellectual community does," says Hannah W. Stewart-Gambino, dean of the college.

So far, the corn has yielded a bumper crop of ideas. A professor in the art department wants to make paper from the husks, a music student has begun composing a jazz piece about the corn, and a chemistry professor is mulling the idea of conducting tests with a class, comparing the carbon makeup of flesh and hair samples from a few students of varying backgrounds to determine how much corn is in their diets. Lee Upton, an English professor and writer in residence, wrote a poem, "Corn," extolling the plant's "spindle of unpocked moons on astral belts."

Meanwhile, Mr. Smith and his fellow farmers worried about hedgehogs [groundhogs] and raccoons robbing the crop before harvest. There was also the specter of a more conventional college pest: rowdy students.