Green Mountain College
ER-17: Departments Involved in Sustainability Research

Three years ago Green Mountain College eliminated its eight academic departments in order to streamline administrative structures and increase interdisciplinary collaboration. The College created three academic divisions: Environmental Studies and Management; Science and Outdoor Leadership, and Humanities, Education and Arts, which function in a similar manner as departments in larger universities. The division chairs oversee and evaluate the 15 to 20 faculty in their division and they are responsible for the quality of all degree programs offered by the division. Faculty are assigned to one or more degree programs, many of which have only one to three full-time faculty. Since degree program faculties do not function as departments and since many faculty contribute to multiple degree programs, we have chosen to use divisions as the operative category for responding to STARS items related to department level assessments. We note, however, that requiring institutions to quantify sustainability research using standard academic departments presupposes that an institution’s means of addressing the inherently interdisciplinary field of sustainability should be assessed by distribution of research across disciplinary areas. We believe that institutions that emphasize sustainability education across the curriculum will best advance this project by eliminating discipline-based departments.

In 2007, Green Mountain College eliminated its eight academic departments in order to streamline administrative structures and increase interdisciplinary collaboration. The College created three academic divisions, Environmental Studies and Management; Science and Outdoor Leadership, and Humanities, Education and Arts, which play the role that departments play in larger universities. The division chairs oversee and evaluate the 15 to 20 faculty in their division; they are responsible for the quality of all degree programs offered by the division. Faculty are assigned to one or more degree programs, many of which have only one to three full-time faculty. Since degree program faculties do not function as departments and since many faculty contribute to multiple degree programs, we have chosen to use divisions as the operative category for responding to STARS items related to department level assessments. We note, however, that requiring institutions to quantify sustainability courses using standard academic departments presupposes that an institution’s means of addressing the inherently interdisciplinary field of sustainability should be assessed by distribution of courses/research across disciplinary areas. We believe that institutions that emphasize sustainability education across the curriculum will best advance this project by eliminating discipline-based departments.