Riding a long green wave: interdisciplinary environmental sciences and studies in higher education

ABSTRACT

What accounts for the remarkable growth of environmental sciences and studies (ESS) in US higher education over the past 50 years? This paper focuses on institutional characteristics to explain this ‘long green wave’ of expansion. Drawing on data from 1345 US higher-education institutions from 1980–2010, we employ three-level hierarchical models to assess institutional and state-level factors associated with the presence of environmental studies and sciences. Findings indicate that environmental studies majors are most likely to be present at liberal arts schools and in states more inclined to adopting environmentally friendly policies, and less likely to exist at schools with large minority enrollments. Environmental sciences majors are less likely to be present at schools with large female enrollments. Two case studies of early adopters highlight the role of faculty, rather than student activists, as change-agents pushing for the development of ESS on college campuses in the 1960s and 70s.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental studies
• environmental sciences
• environmental education
• environmental movement
• organizations

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Meghan Kallman for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. We also thank Mark O’English and Don Dillman at Washington State University and Rebekah Irwin and Kathryn Morse at Middlebury College for their assistance in locating archival materials used in this study and for taking the time to discuss the history of environmental sciences and studies at their respective institutions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/es/about.

2. College Bluebook is a directory of higher education degree programs in the United States first published in 1923, annually since 2001. The regionally and institutionally diverse set of early ESS program adopters included Clemson University, Harvard University, Lamar State College of Technology, Middlebury College, Portland State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Southern Methodist University, and Washington State University.

3. We excluded from our analysis a small number of majors (e.g. environmental design) that include this keyword but do not refer to natural environments; we similarly exclude a small number of science-based majors, such as ‘sustainability’ that fall outside the categorical distinction we are drawing.

4. Doctoral/Research Universities-Extensive is our base dummy category. These are universities which grant more than 50 or more doctoral degrees at least 15 discipline in a given year. Other dummies are Doctoral/Research Universities-Intensive (at least ten doctoral degrees across three disciplines or at least 20 doctoral degrees per year), Master’s Colleges and Universities, Liberal Arts Colleges and Other Baccalaureate Institutions.

5. Revenue per FTE student is adjusted for inflation using Consumer Price Index (CPI) and are presented in 2010 dollars. We also ran models that included a measure of budget change across time periods, rather than absolute revenue per FTE, in order to test the idea that ESS may be implemented as a cost-saving strategy during lean economic periods. This revenue change measure is not a significant predictor, however, and sacrifices an entire panel of observations. As such, we do not include this revenue change measure in final models.

6. In analyses not shown, we ran models that excluded HBCUs, schools with >90% female students, and excluded both. Results, available on request, were essentially unchanged.

7. Woodin was described as an ‘influential faculty member’ in conversation on 29 June 2015 with Rebekah Irwin, Director and Curator, Special Collections & Archives at Middlebury College (personal communication with first author). This conversation also supported the more general notion that the impetus for the new major came primarily from faculty rather than deriving from student demand.

8. Middlebury has memorialized each of these individuals as school luminaries. The environmental studies department today prominently features a Woodin Colloquium series. The J. Rowland Illick Prize in Geography was established at Middlebury in 1986, and for years students boarded the USS Brewster Baldwin research vessel to study Lake Champlain ecology.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erik W. Johnson

Erik W. Johnson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Washington State University. His research focuses on the emergence, development and institutional outcomes of environmental movements. Collaborative research projects examine change over time in public environmental concern and the developing field of environmental crime. Johnson’s research has appeared in journals such asSocial Forces, Environmental Sociology, Mobilization, Environment and Behavior, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, and Social Problems.

Ali. O. Ilhan

Ali O. Ilhan is Assistant Professor of Industrial Design/Design Technology and Society at Ozyegin University in Istanbul. He also serves as the Co-Director of Graduate Studies for the PhD and MSc programs in Design, Technology and Society. He completed his PhD in sociology at Washington State University in 2013. His research interests include computational social science, social network analysis, science and technology studies, sociology of higher education and sociology of design.

Scott Frickel

Scott Frickel is Professor of Sociology and Environment & Society at Brown University. He is the author of five books, mostly recently with James R. Elliott,Sites Unseen: Uncovering Hidden Hazards in American Cities (Russell Sage Foundation, 2018) and with Matthew Albert and Barbara Prainsack, Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Theory and Practice across Disciplines (Rutgers, 2016). Current book projects examine inequality in science and technology and chemical residues as cultural, material, and political objects.