Is Environmental Studies the Walmart of Warren Wilson?

The title of this post--and, in fact, the post itself--is not my own. In an act of shameless appropriation, Ben Feinberg, Chair of the Social Sciences Division, has started a blog for his division called "Jensenual Relations" (great name, I must admit). On that blog, he posted a terrific examination of the relative "weight" of different departments and divisions, starting with the question of the apparent dominance of Environmental Studies over the college curriculum. With his kind permission, I've reposted it here. I think it gives us much food for thought regarding our own division and how FAH might, as Ben says, "claim some of that attention.". I offer a comment of my own, and I invite others to do the same.

Is Environmental Studies the Walmart of Warren Wilson?

We sometimes hear the statement that ENS is "a third of the college." There are many ways to divide up the college, and I am not sure what method is used to come up with this statistic, which has taken on a certain mythical status. I don't, at the moment, have access to the majors of our current or graduated students, so it could be that one third of them are ENS majors.

ENS certainly doesn't provide one-third of the student credits. Last fall (and there may be built-in differences between fall and spring semesters), ENS was the largest single provider of credits, accounting for 8.0% of college. Biology and Chemistry, two programs that provide many credits to the ENS major, accounted for another 5.5% and 6.6%, respectively. In fact, the breakdown by Division (with the top three departments within each division) looked like this:

Arts and Humanities 33.7%
HPS 6.7%, ENG 6.4%, ART 6.1%

Natural Sciences 26.8%
ENS 8.0%, CHM 6.6%, BIO 5.5%

Social Sciences 25.5%
SOC/ANT 6.3%, PSY 4.7%, ODL 3.6%

FRS, Comp I, and PED: 13.3%

Which for some reason doesn't quite add up to 100%. But its close.

(We may wish to remember that these numbers are influenced by the General Education requirements, which ensure that every student take two Natural Sciences courses [Math and Science], three Arts and Humanities [AES, HPS, LIT] and only one Social Science course while two other general education requirements can be met by courses in more than one division, but are most often met in Arts and Humanities [GI and PHI/REL].)

Anyway, ENS is the single largest program, perhaps because the great majority of Natural Science majors choose this major, and that accounts for about a third of the school. This may make it seem disproportionately significant - Arts and Humanities and Social Science programs may seem less visible because students in these areas are divided up into a number of smaller majors.

So, because of its prominence within Natural Sciences, ENS appears like the big kid on the block. Does this make it like Walmart, an entity that uses its massive size as an advantage to bully the smaller mom and pop stores?

We can see one example of this analogy at the beginning of the year, when we all gather in Canon behind tables promoting our majors. We sit and wait for students to wander by with our handouts and balloons and, in the case of Chemistry, our explosions. Suddenly there is an announcement: "All vendors that wish to sell to Walmart, immediately gather at the far end of the room." There, new students are told that they must take such-and-such course right away. It feels a little like the rest of us are being bullied. ENS also requires more credits to graduate than most other majors. And its Intro course usurps the role of languages at the school - students strangely satisfy our language (language and global issues) requirement by taking Intro to ENS, pushing students out of another possible path into the Humanities or Social Sciences. Last year, two new faculty positions were summarily granted to the behemoth without any campus-wide discussion. Could this happen without the big-box pressure?

Our ENS program appears to be thriving, and it not only provides students a great education in the natural sciences, but has helped create a niche for Warren Wilson that helps us attract new students and stay strong. It also directs attention on the major challenge facing us as humans who are busy making our planet uninhabitable. The strength of this program benefits us all.

But one could argue that ENS has also been the vehicle for the Natural Sciences to mold a united front which has given them added strength to push for resources and new faculty positions, and to become, for many the face of our academic program. How can the Social Sciences, with our numerous disparate programs, claim some of this attention?

There are a few possible answers -
1- uniting into a division should help. Perhaps we can be Costco.
2- Recognizing our place and our programs, and their place in the "sustainability" rhetoric of the college. Environmental Studies faculty recognize the importance of sustainability beyond the natural science and environmental issues their department focuses on - the environmental issues and inextricably linked to issues of social justice and economic inequality, for example. Over the years, there have been occasional efforts to make the ENS major more truly interdisciplinary, by incorporating Humanities and Social Science courses. At times this appears like tokenism, and when ENS added new faculty this year, it did so in Chemistry and Biology, not in non-science areas. But the Social Science division already has a counterpart to ENS - an interdisciplinary major that focuses broadly on global issues of sustainability. This is the Global Studies major. This major doesn't get nearly the attention of ENS, but it consistently attracts many majors, many of whom began their careers as ENS majors. If the college, and the Social Science division, recognize the role of Global Studies as a complement to the natural science ENS major - an equal component of the college's commitment to the environment and global sustainability - we would raise the profile of the Social Science academic program in ways that would benefit us all.