Incoming first-year students at UC San Diego have a new graduation requirement: the ability to "understand and address climate change."
School officials said the requirement would be the first such one at a major public university.
That means the approximately 7,000 students in the class of 2028 will need to take one of 40 courses available to satisfy the requirement. A variety of majors have courses in the course catalog that satisfy the obligation, including the obvious, like environmental studies, but also the possibly overlooked, like economics (Energy Economics), history (China Since 1878, and the Anthropocene IV: The Great Acceleration) and visual arts (Bending the Curve: Climate Change Solutions, and Environmentalism in Arts Media).
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One might not be surprised to learn that the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has the most offerings, with 11, including Natural Disasters, Ice and the Climate System, and Life and Climate on Earth.
"Whether undergraduates are majoring in STEM, the humanities, arts, social sciences or any other field, this requirement will equip them with a strong understanding of climate change and how they can contribute to meaningful solutions,” said UCSD chancellor Pradeep Khosla, in part, in a news release posted last week by the university.
The Jane Teranes Climate Change Education Requirement was named for a professor at the Scripps Institution who died in 2022 after she unexpectedly fell ill, according to the university. During her two decades at UCSD, she created several programs designed to educate students in the geosciences, including the Environmental Systems program, and the climate-change studies minor at UCSD.
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In 2011, the school implemented a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) requirement, that, at least in part, provided a framework for the new climate-change course mandate.
"The climate requirement incentivizes and encourages faculty to integrate climate change education into their upper-division courses, and thus deepens the curriculum by focusing on what students can actually do about climate change from their disciplines," Muir College Provost Wayne Yang is quoted in the school's news release on the requirements. "Importantly, it treats climate change as an interdisciplinary issue.”
Officials at the school said efforts were undertaken to align the climate-change requirement in such a way that it would not add to a student's workload. Transfer students will be encouraged to take one of the classes but they will not be compulsory.
