RIVER SUMMER
TAKE THEM TO THE RIVER
The Hudson River is muse to participants in a faculty development experiment
"Picturesque" has come to mean something like "cute" these days. "It’s almost a pejorative term," says Elizabeth Hutchinson, assistant professor of art history, speaking in her office on the third floor of Barnard Hall. The artists and writers of the nineteenth century used the word differently. The eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke wrote about the opposition of the sublime—the feeling of awe we experience in the face of the vast, terrible power of nature—and the beautiful, a sense of harmony, order, and balance that produces "the image of Edenic perfection," as Hutchinson puts it. Nineteenth-century landscape painters would take up the idea of the picturesque as a middle term between the sublime and the beautiful. "It conveyed some sense of the power of the Creator," Hutchinson says, "as well as some of the orderliness that man creates."
The search for the picturesque guided the first coherent school of painting to emerge out of the young American Republic. Beginning in the 1820s, Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and their Hudson River School successors turned away from the traditional academic emphasis on biblical allegories and scenes from classical mythology to confront the American landscape. "The Hudson, for natural magnificence, is unsurpassed," Cole opined in his 1836 "Essay on American Scenery," an impassioned exhortation for painters to take up the artistic challenges posed by their own country. The essay both extols the restorative powers of the American landscape even as it laments a "meager utilitarianism" whose urge for improvement seems poised to crush "the tender flowers of the Imagination … beneath its iron tramp." He and his colleagues painted vivid oils that portrayed the Hudson River Valley in its soft springtime bloom and in its autumnal splendor, finding in all settings natural symbols of enduring truths.
The Hudson River School painters became America’s first art celebrities. Along the way, they helped create a distinctly American cultural identity and made New York City the cultural capital of the nation. "By the 1840s, it was agreed upon that landscape painting was a very American art form," notes Hutchinson. "It was tasteful, democratic, and nationalistic and it was a good idea to have this stuff in your house. Writers of the day said that if you were going to raise your kids, and they were going to have values, you should have some art in your house. The art helped to shape for a rising middle class an ideal of what a home was supposed to be."
In July 2005, Hutchinson led a group of eight professors from colleges all along the Hudson Valley on a hike retracing Cole’s steps through the woods by Kaaterskill Falls near Palenville, New York. The group included a geologist, a geochemist, a law professor, a political scientist, a cognitive psychologist, a biologist, a chemist, and a literature professor. They were engaged in an ambitious experiment in interdisciplinary teaching called "River Summer"—a development seminar in which 40 participants (predominantly faculty members and other education professionals) explored the length of the Hudson River from the Adirondacks to Morningside Heights while living together mostly on a research ship named the R/V Seawolf. The group hiked around the rim of Kaaterskill Clove on a gray, rainy morning, and stopped at a spot where Cole had painted one of his scenes. Hutchinson then distributed pads and drawing implements to the hikers. "I wanted them to understand that finding the picturesque requires a very active work of selection," says Hutchinson. "You don’t just stand there and paint what’s in front of you. You have to make choices about what is a good view."
Hutchinson let them choose different tools to make their drawings. She wanted to show the participants that the choice of tools determines the things you perceive about the landscape. A pencil produces a crisp line but is less useful for shading and volume. Charcoal is good for coloring in large surfaces and is useful for shadow, but not so good at creating lines. Oil pastels are colorful but also not the best at sharp delineation. Everyone had access to the camera lucida, an optical tool that lets you see your pad and your view at the same time.
The group then went on to the nearby Albany Institute of Art to look at some of its Hudson River School paintings. Rather than lecture the professors on paintings, Hutchinson divided them into groups and let them choose a work to present to the others using some of the insights they’d gleaned from their own pursuit of the picturesque. The professors talked about the choices in subject matter, the differing emphases on foreground and background, and the tools employed by the artists. They spoke with the authority of direct experience. They observed that even the masters had a hard time drawing water—a task whose difficulty they had themselves just encountered first hand. "It went pretty much exactly as I hoped," says Hutchinson. "After 9 a.m., I barely opened my mouth. It was really them figuring it out on their own."
Immersed in Difficulty
The day’s lesson illustrated a principle spelled out explicitly by one of its participants. Lisa Son, assistant professor of psychology, studies how students learn best. As it turns out, research has established that challenges are good for learning. "Difficult learning, when you don’t know exactly what you’re supposed to do, is actually beneficial," says Son. "When you’re forced to say something on your own rather than just passively reading or listening, you’re going to be able to retain that information much better."
For four weeks last summer, the organizers of River Summer immersed 40 participants in difficulty, exposing them to unfamiliar methods, vocabularies, habits, ways of seeing; also to swarms of gnats. "Bugs bite you when you’re outside," notes Colgate geologist Bruce Selleck, who ran a segment of the program that was spent camping in the Adirondacks. Selleck has been running outdoor programs his entire professional life. He believes that imposing physical stress on a class builds community and fosters learning. "It rains. It’s cold in the mountains. You have to travel long distances with heavy packs, and climb in high elevations. You have to deal with the possibility that bears might come. You are forced to communicate. It really brings people together."
In this event, the professors and others really did come together, crossing disciplinary and institutional boundaries to forge new personal and professional ties. The four-week program was divided into five modules, each lasting several days. The professors learned about all aspects of the river by dirtying their hands with its flora, fauna, water, and sediment. They studied it with the tools of the geologist, the chemist, and the artist, on a physical scale ranging from the molecules in a water sample to the geological structure of the land, and on a time scale ranging from the billion-year-old rocks at the river’s source upstate to the contemporary legal and political battles over PCBs. Among other activities, the groups tested the water, took core samples of the sediment, went on an archaeological dig, collected zebra mussels, and heard lectures on the history, culture, and economics of the Hudson River. The sciences and the humanities mingled freely in a way they seldom do under ordinary conditions in academia. The pursuit of knowledge, rather than hewing to disciplinary boundaries, mimicked the complexity of the world.
"I try to emphasize that it’s all of a piece," says Selleck. "You can’t talk about water without talking about the trees that grow on the soil through which the water runs. You can’t talk about the water without talking about the rocks. And you can’t talk about the rocks without understanding something about the deep history of time and the history of the planet as a whole without understanding the landscape as a geological and biological ecosystem."
Emerging Earth-Systems Science
This emphasis on the interconnectedness of the earth might sound vaguely metaphysical. In fact it neatly aligns with the main currents in geology, notes Stephanie Pfirman, the founder of River Summer and chair of the environmental science department at Barnard. The foundation of geology used to be plate tectonics; in the last few decades the study of the atmosphere has moved from the periphery of the discipline closer to its core. Today geology is at the center of an emerging "earth systems" science, which looks at the solid earth, the atmosphere, the ocean, and life itself as a single dynamic and interconnected system. At the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, about 200 Columbia-affiliated scientists study how the earth was formed, how the oceans flow, how the atmosphere regulates temperature, and how human intervention changes the world—perhaps to the ultimate detriment of the very climatic conditions that have made complex human civilization possible. "Most environmental scientists appreciate complexity," says Pfirman. Many of them don’t work in laboratories, where they can control all variables so as to test a single hypothesis. "They’re more willing not to have all the answers and not say we have to find an absolute truth in order to understand what’s happening. But we can still learn things, even if our knowledge is always going to be limited."
For teaching complexity, there’s no substitute for getting students out into the world to encounter it. "Real science is not simply chemistry 101, where you control everything and you get the same answers that thousands of students have gotten before you," says Tim Kenna, speaking from the roof of the oceanography building at Lamont-Doherty, which overlooks a stunning view of the Hudson River. Kenna, an associate research scientist in geochemistry at Lamont-Doherty and an adjunct assistant professor of environmental science at Barnard, was hired by Pfirman to administer the program. He was present on all five legs of last year’s program. "Science also involves the excitement of the unknown, where I don’t know what the data are going to tell me."
River Summer originally was conceived as an undergraduate program, but the logistical challenges of mixing faculty from different schools and disciplines convinced Pfirman to try it out on faculty first. Last summer’s inaugural session was funded by the Teagle Foundation as a curriculum-development program. "We decided that we’d do more than just teach each other the content of what we knew," says Pfirman. "We said to ourselves, ‘Let’s see how we can teach this material in the most effective way using innovative pedagogy and interdisciplinary content.’"
The program proved to be so revelatory to its participants that they’ve decided to keep it going for themselves. Pfirman applied for and won a grant from the Mellon Foundation to fund River Summer as a faculty-development program for the next two years. (This year’s River Summer will once again gather roughly 40 faculty members drawn from the 42 institutions of higher education who are members of the Environmental Consortium of Hudson Valley Colleges and Universities for five one-week segments exploring different sections of the Hudson River.) "We learned so much from each other," says Pfirman. "It was just cool, we made connections we couldn’t have otherwise made, and picked up so many things to incorporate into our classes, that we felt we could do it again for faculty." The ties that faculty have made over the summer are the germ for an informal "College of the Hudson Valley," says Pfirman. A whole new kind of intellectual sociability emerged on the Seawolf’s deck, says Kenna. "At a professional conference, you do not want to be the person to ask that dumb question," he says. "You either know what you’re talking about or you keep your mouth shut." On the boat, however, all such competitive anxiety dissipated in the camaraderie of shared work. Faculty from research universities mixed with faculty from community colleges on a footing of unfeigned equality. "Some of the best units were taught by people from tiny colleges or community colleges."
Taking It Back to the Classroom
The new colleagues have lectured in one another’s classes and have even begun exploring research projects they might collaborate on in the future. Pfirman hopes eventually to deliver the fruits of three more years of faculty development directly to undergraduates in the form of a River Summer or a semester-long "River Fall" that would introduce students to a hands-on, community-building, interdisciplinary approach to education. Many of the faculty touched by last year’s pilot run report having their eyes opened about their teaching and research in surprising ways. Elizabeth Hutchinson never thought that her work as a professional art historian had any direct crossover with her personal environmentalist beliefs. But Thomas Cole was protesting the unfettered industrialization of nineteenth-century America. His aesthetic complaint against the ravaging of wilderness by untrammeled improvement anticipated the feeling and tone of the later preservationist movement. Cole’s intuitions about the spiritual costs of improvement anticipate our later scientific understanding of the threat that overdevelopment poses to a complexly interdependent ecosystem.
From the late 1960s through the 1970s, environmentalists sprang up in defense of the Hudson. They have managed, over the past 30 years, to effect dramatic improvement in the river’s overall health. Some of this political, legal, and economic history also was told on the Seawolf as it made its way down the Hudson. The political struggle has influenced the water, the fish, and the plant life of the river’s ecosystem. In 1966, the Hudson River Fisherman’s Association, a coalition of commercial and recreational fisherman, founded the organization that would later become the consortium; John Cronin, an environmental scholar at Pace University and a former fisherman, was part of the coalition. In 1983, Cronin became the first full-time Riverkeeper. In 1984, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., became Riverkeeper’s chief prosecuting attorney. The group has successfully challenged hundreds of polluters and secured hundreds of millions of dollars from those polluters to remediate the Hudson.
This struggle has itself been influenced by ideas that stretch back to Thomas Cole and the patrons who were his first audience, and some of the first people to lament the loss of the wilderness and a nostalgia for it. "My unit on the Hudson River School wasn’t particularly about the here and now," Hutchinson says. "But when there’s a town-planning session in Rye, New York, and they’re talking about tourism and designing their riverfront and preserving the character of the Hudson, they’re building on the same ideas I’ve dealt with," she says. "They’re dealing with real-life problems that we have right now."
Hutchinson’s is only one of the many epiphanies that faculty went through last summer, of the kind that Pfirman hopes she can someday bring to a generation of students. "We send our students abroad for a semester, and they are transformed by those experiences," says Pfirman. "The same kinds of experiences can happen here."
—Wesley Yang