Scholars Consider Alternatives for An Interdisciplinary Curriculum

With attention to environmental issues growing in recent years, college campuses nationwide have seen a surge of interest in environmental studies courses.

But while some universities offer special programs to meet these needs, Harvard is still considering how to design a curriculum for a field of study that reaches across virtually every academic discipline.

During the past year, an 18-member faculty committee has been weighing options for strengthening environmental studies at Harvard. The committee, which will make a recommendation to President Derek C. Bok this spring, has concluded that if environmental studies ever becomes an official undergraduate concentration, it will have to develop over time out of a less formal program.

The members of the University Working Group on the Environment, appointed by Bok last spring, have consulted students and faculty in all the University's schools in order to formulate recommendations for improving environmental studies at Harvard.

Harvard currently offers a number of courses in environmental studies, but there is no coordinated curriculum for the discipline. Since the inception of the special concentrations program in 1972, about 15 undergraduates have chosen to concentrate in environmental studies by creating their own special concentration.

The committee is unlikely to propose to Bok a new environmental studies concentration, such as the ones many other universities offer, according to committee members.

Instead, the faculty committee is looking at ways to consolidate and fill gaps in what is now an uncoordinated and incomplete selection of environmental course offerings in the College and many of the graduate schools, says Michael W. Binford, a member of the Working Group and an associate professor of landscape architecture at the Graduate School of Design.

A Broad Discipline

Most faculty on the committee agree that studies of the environment, which could include work in most of the natural and social sciences, is too broad a topic for an undergraduate concentration at this time, Binford says.

"My own opinion is that it would be too early to create a special environmental concentration," said Working Group member and Baird Professor of Science Edward O. Wilson.

But Pratt Public Service Professor Lewis M. Branscomb, who chairs the Working Group, says that any recommendation the committee makes will have the potential to evolve into an interdisciplinary degree program such as Social Studies.

"My hope is that we'll come up with an evolutionary strategy that [has an environmental studies concentration] as a possible endpoint," Branscomb said.

Unlike the student and faculty disagreement that in the past has accompanied the creation of new departments on campus, the faculty's restraint in developing an environmental studies concentration is shared by many students.

"A lot of us are wary of establishing a big building and calling it the environmental studies building," says Trenton H. Norris, a second-year law student who acted as a liaison between the Harvard Environmental Network, an umbrella organization of all campus environmental groups, and the Working Group.

Environmental studies could be construed to include almost every discipline, Norris says, which may weaken professors' work by placing them apart from their colleagues in an all-inclusive department.

Another reason for the committee's wait-and-see approach is that the development of a new concentration is only possible through a vote of the entire Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Binford says, and a lack of sufficient support for the program could be a major setback.

Possible Options

Although members of the University Working Group on the Environment are clear about what they will not recommend, they are still in the process of choosing among several different means of structuring environmental studies--short of creating a new concentration.

Many students and faculty agree that one of the first steps towards improving environmental studies at Harvard is the creation of a focal point for the discipline. Without any central administration, the study of the environment has become balkanized among the College and each of the graduate schools, Norris says.

One way to focus the discipline is to facilitate the process of developing a special concentration in the environment by reducing the bureaucratic obstacles for special concentrators, Branscomb says.

The plan being considered by the committee is to create "more of a grooved track" so that people doing environmental studies "don't have to reinvent the wheel each time," he says.

One of the four undergraduates pursuing a special concentration degree in environmental studies this year says that developing a special concentration has been easy in comparison to finding professors to teach her.

Amy L. Salzhauer '91 decided to create her own concentration in environmental decision making at the beginning of her junior year. After struggling to find professors to teach her one-on-one tutorials, Salzhauer says she believes her needs would have best been met by an interdisciplinary committee that could offer its own tutorials.

"I constantly feel like I've been asking professors for favors," she says. "I've found professors to be very helpful but they have no reason to be helpful."

The faculty committee is also considering recommendations for the development of more tracks within existing departments for students with a special interest in the environment.

Michael B. McElroy, the chair of the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, says his department is likely to offer a new program of study with concentration credit for courses in government and economics by next fall.

McElroy says that departments could offer stronger programs in environmental studies than an interdisciplinary committee, since they have the power to hire faculty and shape their own curricula.

"Departments put muscle into programs that interdisciplinary programs do not," he says.

Another option the Working Group is considering is to give recognition to students who take certain environmental courses, in addition to their required concentration courses. The College would note on those students' degrees that they had done significant work in environmental studies.

Programs at Other Universities

Harvard's response to the student interest in environmental studies, however, lags significantly behind that of other universities, some of which have offered a degree program in that field for nearly 20 years.

Faculty at both Harvard and other schools with environmental concentrations say the biggest challenge to developing an environmental degree program is ensuring that students learn the depth as well the breadth of the field.

At Yale, where an undergraduate environmental program has been in place since 1984, students in the program have to satisfy the requirements of both the environmental major and another full major.

Although the program has succeeded in stressing multidisciplinary approaches to environmental issues, "The big disadvantage is that the burden of satisfying two full majors leaves little time for electives or advanced course work," says William Smith, a professor of forest biology at Yale, who has chaired the environmental studies program.

"We have differences of opinion on whether we're looking at a discipline or whether we're looking at the focus of the energies of many areas of the faculty onto different issues," Smith says.

Berkeley and Brown attempt to achieve depth in an almost limitless field by dividing their programs into three branches of study.

About 40 people graduate each year from Berkeley's environmental studies program, which has been in existence since 1972. Students choose to study in one of three fields--physical, biological or social--until their senior year, when they work together as teams on local environmental projects.

Past projects have included the health of San Francisco Bay and the management of toxic wastes on the Berkeley campus, says James Anderson, an anthropology professor affiliated with the department.

The program's growth is limited only by its resources, Anderson says, but as an interdisciplinary field its students have become "academic orphans."

"We don't really buy any faculty time so the faculty have to donate their time," he says.

Brown's environmental studies curriculum, like Berkeley's, is divided into three areas of study--science, policy and development.

The environmental studies courses at Brown are continually oversubscribed, and the program is looking for ways to grow to meet the demand, says Allison L. Smith, a sophomore in the program from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

One of the introductory environmental studies classes was so popular among non-environmental studies majors that it drew a crowd of 350 people last year, even though only about 30 people join the program each year.

Although such popular environmental studies programs are often short on resources necessary to expand, the mere existence of the programs can attract substantial financial support.

Last week the Brown program received a $2 million donation for the hiring of more faculty, and this fall private donors gave Yale $20 million for the development of a biospheric institute.

Scholars agree that although Harvard does not offer any cohesive environmental studies program, the problem has been more one of organization than of ability.

"I don't think Harvard is behind any university in its capacity to provide training and research in environmental science," Wilson says. "All we need to do is provide a more coherent structure."

And some Harvard faculty members say that only by waiting to see how the field of environmental studies develops can Harvard provide a program that would become a lasting part of the undergraduate curriculum.

"I think it's right that we go slowly," McElroy says. "Some of these programs tend to be soft and faddish."