Vassar's new multidisciplinary environmental studies program is the result of an intensive development effort by faculty and students. This effort began in 1995, when a small group of faculty eager for Vassar to add environmental studies to its curriculum began to meet.
In the spring of 1996, this group submitted a funding proposal to alumna Priscilla Bullitt Collins, who was visiting the campus to dedicate the ecology field station that bears her name. Collins responded with a generous development grant that, during a four-year period, supported a number of initiatives designed to test the interest of faculty and students, and to help faculty in all fields discover the relationship of their scholarship to environmental studies. These initiatives included team-taught experimental courses and course development grants, a lecture series, and a faculty seminar. This seminar, which involved presentations by Vassar faculty and by prominent outside speakers, involved as many as one-third of the faculty, and represented almost every department on campus.
The program that emerged from the development project was approved by the faculty in December of 1999 and granted New York State certification early in 2000. It is supported by a second major gift from Patricia Bullitt Collins, a generous endowment whose proceeds support annually a wide range of program activities.
H. Daniel Peck, John Guy Vassar Professor of English and a Thoreau scholar, is the program's first director.
