Our guiding principle is that an undergraduate environmental studies major at a liberal arts college should address all areas of the curriculum. At the same time, we believe that such a major develops best from deep knowledge of one discipline. Students in our program, therefore, focus their studies in a single field of their choice. They link these disciplinary studies, undertaken in individual Vassar departments, to broader issues of the environment through multidisciplinary courses, many of them team-taught by professors from different departments, offered by the program itself.
Our majors have their disciplinary homes all over the campus (any Vassar department, from Biology to Art History, may provide a concentration), thus encouraging a salutary range of viewpoints among our students. But when these students come together in the Program's own multidisciplinary courses, they share their diverse disciplinary perspectives and, at the same time, learn how their different forms of knowledge gather around the field of environmental studies.
Equally important to environmental studies is knowledge of the natural sciences and their methods. Such knowledge, we believe, requires substantial work in one science, and therefore all our majors reach at least the intermediate level in biology, chemistry, or geology. Our majors also involve themselves in a substantial amount of field experience, which links their course work to specific problems in the world beyond the Vassar campus.
Framing the environmental studies major at Vassar are the Program's required introductory seminar, "Environmentalisms in Perspective," and its senior seminar. The introductory seminar provides a theoretical and historical grounding in the field, while the senior seminar is a practicum. Here, in the first semester of the senior year, our majors bring their varied disciplinary perspectives to bear on a particular problem in environmental thinking. The major culminates, during the second semester of the senior year, in a thesis or project, in which students focus their acquired knowledge and methods in individual research.
