In the last 15 years there has been an important movement in many universities towards the creation of graduate programs on Sustainability Sciences. Those programs, that offer masters and PhD training, may have other titles, such as Sustainable Development, Environmental Sciences, or Environment and Development. They have in common the fact of being structured on an interdisciplinary basis. And as such, they can gather faculty and students coming from various disciplinary origins.

Now a new discussion is starting in some universities and I find interesting to it share among the members of the Forum:

1. Should we also create specific undergraduate programs on Sustainability Science?
2. Is this an issue to be treated as an academic field in itself, at the early stages of the training of students?
3. What are the risks for the students involved in a full interdisciplinary undergraduate training, in terms of not having a solid disciplinary basis as a condition to reach interdisciplinarity afterwards?
4. Is sustainability to be treated as an “interdisciplinary discipline”?

I have put down some of my thoughts in my paper “Sustainability Science and the University: Towards Interdisciplinarity” available at:

 http://www.cid.harvard.edu/cidwp/grad/024.html.

I am interested, though, to hear what the other members of the Forum think.

Marcel, thanks for inititating this important topic.

When my colleague (Barry Ness) a few years ago interviewed a rather big group of people on the issue of how to organise interdisciplinary activities at universities he came across one very strong proponent (and a very influential one as well) of undergraduate programmes on sustainability science: Here is the quote (my emphasis)  from Barry's report (which is very well worth reading - I can send it by e-mail):

Marcel & Lennart

In regards to Marcel's third question, Lennart mentioned the small project I carried out in this area a few years back. One of the most striking comments from one of the interviewees (i.e. organization directors) in the project was that the ideal researcher he sought for their research projects were "competent disciplinarians" who were capable and enthusiastic about working beyond her/his disciplinary boundaries. Even though he was referring to just researchers, I am confident this applies to a variety of career pursuits. With an undergraduate program in Sustainability Science, would we really receive more competent undergraduates in the field if they had no formal (traditional) disciplinary grounding? Would these students then have the ability to be accepted in more traditional disciplinary graduate programs, if they decided to take that path? I foresee two options that might help to quell these sorts of issues:

1. The option of a sustainability science minor where the student in addition to her main program studies, earns a given amount of credits/points in the field of sustainability science. With such a program there would still be the academic grounding but also there would also be the opportunity to rather in-depthly explore the issues that lie outside disciplinary thresholds. This might also be a way to ease into an undergraduate program.
2. Sustainability Science undergrad with a "leaning" or minor in a particular disciplinary direction. ASU's new undergrad programs have made a small step in this direction by at least dividing things up into the B.S. track (natural sciences and engineering) and the B.A. track (social sciences, humanities, etc). Such an option would allow a student to be well grounded in the field (SustSci), but also provide the opportunity to more in-depthly focus on a disciplinary perspective on various issues of (un)sustainability.

Barry