UNIVERSITY EFFORT AND EDUCATION
Written by: Aaron Allen, Julie Carr, Alyssa Owen
One cf the highlights of environmental affairs at Tulane is the environmental education component. In the Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Environmental Studies Program (ENST) is achieving great successes in both education and campus environmental effort. The ENST, the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, the Environmental Health Sciences Department of the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and the Center for Bioenvironmental Research (CBR) are the administrative bodies putting forth effort to make Tulane the environmental university of the South. To truly become such a benchmark, goals (both educational and practical, such as recycling) need to be institutionalized into all facets of the University.
Tulane has an Environmental Studies Program for an undergraduate coordinate degree. It is not a department, but rather an interdisciplinary curriculum that is added to a traditional degree granting major (the degree reads: B.A. or B.S. in "Major" and Environmental Studies). A student cannot receive a B.A. or B.S. solely in Environmental Studies. Tulane offers a broad array of classes in diverse disciplines involving many departments. The ENST also acts a resource for students researching graduate programs, internships, and summer or laboratory work and / or study. Presently there are 35 undergraduates in the ENST, and numbers are increasing every year.
Much of the funding for the ENST comes from a Department of Energy (DoE) grant that encompasses environmental research and education, and this is via the CBR. Some of the money is used as grants to develop environmental courses or infuse existing classes with environmental content. President Eamon Kelly earmarked Environmental Studies as one of the four focal points of the university (along with urban studies, international studies, and information technology), yet the university administration has given little support to the ENST. Instead, the ENST has had to find outside sources of funding and operate with part-time staff. It is unsure what path the ENST will take when the grant period runs out (this fiscal year), and when a new president is appointed (next academic year).
For years the ENST has been without a centralized office and has operated instead out of faculty advisor offices and the ENST Coordinator's office (which is shared with someone else). Now, after years of trying to get space, the ENST, with the help of the CBR, has one-and-one-half offices in Stern Hall for staff people and an office in Dinwiddie Hall with the Green Club. When the remodeling of Alcee Fortier is complete (proposed for the spring of 1998), the Green Club, the CBR administrative offices, and the ENST offices will all have their own work space and share the same hallway, effectively centralizing the environmental programming of the university - a much needed change, since there is no university "Office of Environmental Affairs." These changes are being accomplished as a direct result of the CBR's leadership. The CBR has been truly instrumental in many environmental initiatives at Tulane. They have opened many opportunities for the program and its students.
The ENST is very involved with students on campus, most notably with the Tulane Green Club, the campus environmental group, and also with Women in Science (incidentally, most of the students in the ENST are female). The ENST hired all the officers of the Green Club to work on educational initiatives, such as an environmental course catalog, and to keep office hours, so there is more of an office presence when the new offices open. Additionally, the ENST purchased for the Club a new computer and will furnish their office in the new Environmental Studies/CBR building. The DoE grant for the ENST also pays for the printing of the Environmental Forum, an environmental newsletter published by Tulane and Xavier University students. The ENST also is active in bringing in speakers and in planning other projects and events. Additionally, the ENST is very involved with supporting Tulane's environmental faculty by offering course development grants and faculty seminars. Most notably, last summer the ENST held the first Environmental Faculty Enrichment Seminar. The seminar dealt with restructuring the undergraduate program, developing new classes, and training faculty members as environmental educators. This coming summer another faculty development seminar will take place, this time focusing on the Mississippi River Basin. Finally, the ENST works closely with the Environmental Engineering Department, the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, the Center for Bioenvironemtal Research, and the Tulane Environmental Law and Advocacy Program. Despite many institutional barriers, the diverse entities manage to collaborate on projects, events, and educational initiatives, though communication between the parties can often be sporadic and inconsistent.
Overall, Tulane's Environmental Studies Program continues to mature. The services and programs offered are excellent, and are constantly improving. Two significant staffing problems exist, however. The ENST does not, however, have a full time staff or faculty person. Instead there is one part time program coordinator, an adjunct professor who is Coordinator of Environmental Education (and who presently teaches three classes), a full professor who is the official advisor (and who started the ENST in the 1970s), and two other full professors who are co-chairs of the faculty Committee on Environmental Education. This administrative arrangement has benefits, including varied input, and downfalls, most notably that there is no point person or key decision making authority and thus new initiatives and decisions often take longer than usual to agree upon and implement. Those on the Environmental Studies Education Committee and those involved directly with the ENST are very supportive, enthusiastic, and optimistic. Secondly, the university needs an environmental economics professor, as the requirement was dropped for the 1997-98 school year because there was no professor.c contributes environmentally to the New Orleans community in many ways. Faculty and students conduct much on-going research. For example, faculty and students conducted a study of aquatic remediation of aquatic environments in the lower Mississippi River for the Department of Energy. Students also do independent studies projects, and honors theses that involve environmental issues, such as Superfund sites in New Orleans. As yet, there is no catalog of such work for easy reference, but one is being developed.
Some classes have projects in their curriculum to study the New Orleans community from an environmental point of view. Last year, the Environmental Sociology class, taught by Dr. Timmons Roberts, did a random telephone survey of community attitudes toward a variety of environmental issues.
Along with Xavier University, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Housing Authority of New Orleans, Tulane formed the Campus Affiliates Program. These groups created this program to improve the living conditions and social and economic well-being in the C.J. Peete housing development. Part of the program involves testing water and air quality for the residents, then determining steps to improve them. Additionally, the Tulane/Xavier CBR helped the residents to create their own monetary unit to use within the housing development.
History of the Environmental Studies Program
A Newcomb College student and a Tulane College student initiated the Tulane Environmental Studies Program in 1970 or 1972. It was, initially, a self-designed major approved by the Committee on Academic Standards. One of the difficulties in developing the program was making it professionally acceptable so that students could get into graduate programs. Dr. Victoria Bricker, the chairperson of the Curriculum Committee at the time, suggested the idea of a coordinate major, that involves majoring in an already-existing Tulane department, as well as the interdepartmental major. This would give the student expertise in one area, such as biology, chemistry, or economics; and a general understanding of the environment and its ecological, social, and political processes.
The administration approved the coordinate major and included it in the university catalog in 1978. The program differentiated between physical, life, and social science majors in the science requirements necessary for the major. The basic requirements involved courses in biology, chemistry, geology, physics, economics, politics, philosophy, and sociology. It is important to note that the Environmental Studies major was a combination of already-existing Tulane University courses. In the 1994-95 school year, in accordance with a new university objective to become the environmental university of the South, the university redeveloped Tulane's Environmental Studies Program. The most important improvement was the creation of specially-designed environmental classes, such as Environmental Chemistry, Global Environmental Policy, Environmental Communication, Environmental Sociology, and Environmental Economics.
Jobs:Tulane's Future
Tulane's Career Services center offers resources on the job opportunities available to environmental studies students. In its library are several books that describe the range of career possibilities for a student interested in the environment. The problem with much of the information was that it is not current. The most recent of these books is the 1996-97 Occupational Outlook Handbook, developed by the Department of Labor. It gives detailed descriptions of job categories, then lists more specific occupations in that field. Environmental categories include such things as forestry and conservation sciences. The Handbook also provides information on the necessary training, potential earnings, and sources for further research. The only other recent (1996) book is called 100 Jobs in the Environment (oddly enough, there is a sticker on its title page that reads "provided by Philip Morris"). The center also has a large folder containing information on internships for those seeking experience in environmental fields. A couple of the more interesting internships were with GreenCorps and the Rainforest Action Network. All of these resources are readily available for use in the center's library, and the staff are quite helpful, but again much of the materials are dated.