The list of the faculty on the committee in charge of the Nature and Culture major could have been drawn from a miniature UC Davis General Catalog. Their areas of expertise span the intellectual spectrum, from Spanish and classics and environmental horticulture to microbiology, geology, and wildlife, fish and conservation biology, with several stops at English, linguistics, history, comparative literature, and evolution and ecology. Their interest and enthusiasm--passion is not too strong a word--for the program and its innovative, interdisciplinary approach are fueled by their belief in its benefit not only to students but, equally, to themselves.
"Teaching 'Intersections of Nature and Culture' completely transformed the way I view science as an activity and led me to a completely new understanding of my own discipline," said Mark Wheelis, a microbiologist whose expertise is in biological weapons and who co-teaches two of the program's core courses with Scott McLean. "Learning about something by comparing it to something we know is probably an intrinsic cognitive strategy of humans. I came to understand that the concepts of metaphor and narrative are as important in scientific thinking as they are in humanistic and artistic thinking and expression."
Vice Provost Dale puts it another way: "It's not just the students who are being exposed to other knowledge, different from what they're familiar with and feel safe in; it's also faculty educating faculty in each other's disciplines. And that's what happens when botanists and English professors sit around in a room designing curriculum for the major and slugging it out over the meaning of life."
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There are compelling reasons why interdisciplinary programs such as Nature and Culture are gaining acceptance in academia--a culture traditionally tending to favor sharp delineation between fields of study and pooh-poohing any notion that cross-disciplinarity has value. Those reasons have much to do with the environmental predicament the world finds itself in as it enters the 21st century.
"Environmental issues are extraordinarily complex and involve every aspect of the world--human beings, animals, plants, the weather and the like," observed Robertson, who was Nature and Culture's first program director when it was established in 1991. "Our environment cannot be understood without involving all the ways that human beings have tried to make sense out of the world: religious, literary, social, political, economic, scientific.
"Why has this whole business of the humanities and the environment become so popular in the 1990s? Why has it taken off like crazy, so that the organizers of [last February's] North American Interdisciplinary Conference on the Environment in Reno were inundated with applications from people who wanted to participate? I think the reason is that we're not as successful as we want to be [in solving our environmental problems]. When you do things and they don't work the way you want them to work, then you try something else."
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Certainly the students who choose to major in Nature and Culture can be said to be trying "something else." Its appeal stems from the integrated curriculum and its invitation to explore some of the most fundamental questions human beings can ask themselves: How do we come to know anything? What is our relationship with the nonhuman world? How do we understand that world, and how do we then act in relationship with that world?
"For me the course work was like a dream come true," said Sasha Davies '95. "I knew I was in the right place, because all the conversations were around the issues I wanted to have some impact on in my life, wherever I ended up. The Nature and Culture major created that bridge between the humanities and the sciences that, to me, was all about communication--knowing enough in both areas to be effective."
Davies works for the investment firm of Charles Schwab in San Francisco--hardly the place you'd expect to find someone who graduated with a major in Nature and Culture. But she says that the program's interdisciplinary focus has been an asset. She's currently assigned to Schwab's Year 2000 project (like nearly every other business in the world, Schwab is racing to ensure its computers are capable of handling the turn of the century) and says the Nature and Culture major gave her the grounding she needs to talk to both the techies and the users of the products being developed.
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Mark Wheelis says the Nature and Culture major has been an eye-opener for many students. "It's demystified science for them. They've come to understand it's not something mysterious and arcane and unbearably difficult; it's one of a number of modes of understanding the world that humans have developed."
The Nature and Culture Program distinguishes itself, says Vice Provost Dale, as a rare instance of a major that seeks to break the major's "stranglehold" on young people's educational development. Once students in a large research university such as UC Davis settle on a major, Dale says, they're usually not encouraged to continue exploring outside that limited field. But the world outside the university demands flexibility and values the habits of thought that lead to a variety of approaches to problem solving. Dale says entrepreneurial efforts on the part of individual faculty members are what enable programs like Nature and Culture to overcome the large university's inherent inability to field a really comprehensive general education program. If given a choice of a coherent curriculum with very active faculty participation--faculty working to design a course that actually relates to what students might need to know in the modern world--"students vote with their feet," Dale says; they'll choose that program rather than just whatever fits into their schedule that particular quarter.
But is there a down side to majoring in Nature and Culture? With college costs rising and most well-paying careers requiring a master's or doctor's degree, does it make sense to graduate with a major most employers have never heard of?
It can make sense, McLean says, for those students who have a clear idea of where they eventually want to work, what career they want to pursue. "My questions to the students who want to major in Nature and Culture are, 'How are you going to support yourself? What is it you plan to do? If you don't have an answer to that, go away and think about it and come back and talk to me when you're starting to get an answer. We need to decide right now what that is, and you need to be taking those courses that will allow you to do that.'"
McLean says this dismays some students. "It's the last thing they expect to hear or want to hear; 'That's what my dad says to me; I'm trying to get away from that. That's why I'm here.' And I say, 'Well, this is not the place to get away from that.'"
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Mark Wheelis has a quote from Wendell Berry's Unsettling of America that he reads to his Nature and Culture students:
"If we conceive of a culture as one body, which it is, we see that all of its disciplines are everybody's business and that the proper university product is therefore not the whittled-down, isolated mentality of expertise, but a mind competent in all its concerns."
"I'd like to think that Nature and Culture is the very beginning of a wave of transformation in higher education in this country," Wheelis says. "If I'm wrong, if we do not successfully change our curricula to encourage more interdisciplinary thought and to train our graduates to have that broad perspective, then I think as a nation we're going to be poorly prepared to deal with all of the problems the world is facing--facing now and will be facing much, much more acutely in the next few decades."
