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About the Author
Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.
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Recent Posts
The Rankings Game | Comment [3]
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The Higher Education Act and the Education Industry | Comment [2]
A Good Day for History Teaching | Comment [4]
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Featured Articles By the Author
Green General Education?
The Washington Post ran a very interesting piece this morning. Reporter Susan Kinzie argues that “environmental fervor” is “transforming the curriculum, permeating classrooms, academic majors and expensive new research institutes.” Kinzie contends that the new push is “infusing curriculum . . . with an environmental consciousness.” Or that “the topic can be found across the academic spectrum, often popping up in unexpected places, including fashion design, medicine and law.”
We are all aware of the remarkable energy behind the environmental movement — Al Gore, after all, invented neither the Internet nor environmentalism. Environmentalism has been a major factor in America at least since the origins of the conservation movement in the late 19th century. Its modern phase began in response to the first oil shock in the 1970s. Its power in this country derives from its linkage to the end of the idea (as described by the great Stanford historian David Potter) that Americans were “the people of plenty” — that we had all the land and natural resources we would ever need. By 1973 we began to think of ourselves as a “needy people” for the first time, and that made the stewardship of our natural resources have a new political importance. Since then the realization that the human impact on global climate change could not be denied has given environmentalism urgency and primacy as a social issue.
But the undergraduate curriculum has been rather slow to respond to the broader implications of environmentalism. In my own field, American history, a significant subfield of environmental history has been emerging since the 1960s. Likewise, there are courses in other humanities fields (on Thoreau and environmentalism in literature for instance). Some have been around for a long time: I took a course on conservation policy in political science as a graduate student, and engineering and several of the natural science fields have long featured environmental curriculum. There are also a number of different new undergraduate programs concerned with the environment, and in some institutions it is possible to major in one part or another of the field. In other words, the curriculum in 2008 is much greener than it was in 1973.
My question is whether this rather patchwork response is sufficient to the task? After all, the relationship of humankind to the natural world has long been one of the great organizing ideas of liberal education, but the models have largely been biological. Surely the case can be made that our general-education programs ought to begin to reflect an ecological-environmental understanding of human history and contemporary interaction. The Post quotes the chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University (are we surprised?) as saying the emphasis on the environment is “getting a little out of proportion,” contending that the issue needs to be dealt with scientifically and economically. I don’t suppose any thoughtful person disagrees. But don’t we need to incorporate environmental perspectives more systematically into our overall understanding of undergraduate liberal education?
Posted at 11:51:20 AM on June 22, 2008 | All postings by Stan KatzComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
If GMU’s suggestion that environmentalism should remain in the realm of economics and the hard sciences is logical, why should other disciplines include it in their scope? Though saving the environment is important, it should not be addressed in areas for which it is not a natural fit. Let us all be realistic, remember that environmentalism is no different than any other area specific subject, and categorize it appropriately.
— Astro · Jun 23, 07:12 AM · #