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Students could ‘come out with an environmental studies degree and really not know anything more than a high school student about actual science,’ one scholar says

In recent years, City University of New York Graduate Center awarded doctorates to students whose work entailed the following: reimagining “experiences of formerly incarcerated Black women” using “Black Feminist thought”; examining the 1521 “Black-led” Christmas Rebellion on La Española island; studying whether California prison officers deliberately promote racial conflict among prisoners; and demonstrating “how Black women and white slaveowners understood Quebec’s geography of isolation as one in which the landscape could be used to create freedom or to reinforce captivity.”

While one might easily surmise these PhDs were awarded by the history or African American studies department, that would be wrong. They hail from CUNY’s Earth and Environmental Science program.

Earth and Environmental Science is no stranger to awarding PhDs for dissertations that fall outside the bounds of natural sciences. It’s been done for decades. Whether it should remains a matter of debate, with scientists seeing the pros and cons of both sides.

“EES is a discipline concerned with any and all things related to the environment. That certainly includes studying how sociopolitical issues affect, or are affected by, the environment,” said Matt Burgess, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wyoming, who previously worked in CU Boulder’s environmental studies program.

“For example,” Burgess noted, “I know EES professors who study the effects of climate change on prison conditions in the south, where there often isn’t air conditioning.”

“That is a perfectly legitimate line of inquiry in EES, and I could imagine scenarios where one might want to interview prisoners or explore effects of extreme heat on prison violence as part of that inquiry.”

Not everyone agrees, however.

Sadredin “Dean” Moosavi, a geologist at Riverland College in Minnesota, told The Fix in an October telephone interview that students could “come out with an environmental studies degree and really not know anything more than a high school student about actual science.”

Historically universities housed geology programs in their college of science with chemistry and physics while placing their geography programs with other disciplines from the humanities, he noted. In the past few decades though, geology and geography programs were frequently combined into Earth science programs to reduce administration, Moosavi said.

Environmental science programs, which traditionally could be affiliated with geology, geography, or biology, he added, were brought into these larger umbrella programs as well.

These kinds of arranged academic marriages, he said, have led to the creation of programs where scientists doing work in physics and chemistry are sharing their department with people unfamiliar with the natural sciences and who are either largely focused on policy or “who really have more in common with [scholars in] African American studies and ethnic studies.”

“This,” he said, “creates huge problems,” later adding, “The oil and water do not mix well.”

Not so, Burgess told The Fix: “I think there’s value in natural and social sciences coexisting in departments that study the environment, as lots of interesting research questions cut across natural and social science.”

Kieren Howard, executive officer of CUNY’s Earth and Environmental Sciences program, did not respond to a request from The College Fix asking how the recent scholarship focused on African-American studies fits within an EES program, and whether a science program awarding doctorates to students researching these topics could lead to their work being seen as more scientific or objective than warranted.

The debate presents a more pressing problem as new programs emerge under an academic paradigm that prioritizes critical studies and diversity, equity and inclusion concepts.

Stanford’s Earth System Science program, for example, houses geologists, biologists, biogeochemists and other researchers focused on work in the hard sciences. However, it also has several current, former, or associated faculty that now hold positions in the school’s newly launched Department of Environmental Social Sciences where they study social, behavioral, and psychological components of infectious disease and climate change.

The Earth and Environmental Sciences, or EES, graduate program at the City University of New York Graduate Center, similarly houses seismologists, paleontologists, and atmospheric scientists, but also cultural geographers and environmental psychologists.

Moosavi said this can lead to intradepartmental conflicts between factions, as well as make geology and related disciplines more susceptible to the influence of DEI; moreover, these programs lend greater scientific credibility to their graduates than they sometimes deserve.

Using his alma mater, the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, as an example, Moosavi noted, when he was there in the 1990s the college mostly offered degrees in the natural and applied sciences but also had an environmental studies program that was more about policy.

Because of this, he said, it was “really hard for [graduates of that program] to make meaningful contributions other than in the political realm where they could talk about things without necessarily knowing what they were talking about.”

If one jumps ahead to the present, Moosavi said, due to the social justice and environmental justice movements, “a lot of power has been given to people from these programs even though they still don’t know anything about science.”

Burgess said he agreed that some of Moosavi’s criticisms “describe real situations that occur in some cases.”

“I think the tradeoff is that having social scientists and humanists (especially social scientists) in the same department as physical scientists can foster collaborations that cut across those disciplines,” Burgess told The Fix. “How to balance those considerations is something each university needs to figure out, but I don’t believe there’s a one-size-fits-all answer.”

“You can either create silos, by separating everyone, or you create interdisciplinary departments whose graduates have a diversity of skills and trainings,” he said. “Each school has to figure out what the right balance to strike is for them.”

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