Geologist Gary Ernst knew he had to get down on the ground.
As he tried to assess the effects of regional climate change in California’s White-Inyo mountain range, east of the Sierra Nevada, Ernst realized that remote sensing imagery wasn’t going to cut it. Instead, he needed to take teams of students into the high alpine deserts to inventory the vegetation. “I knew the geological substrate,” he recalls. “But the students were far more sophisticated in terms of plant biology than I was, and every summer I learned something from them.”
Ernst isn’t talking about graduate students. For the five-year project that began in 1997, he turned to undergraduates majoring in earth systems and biological sciences. “I used to work exclusively with postdocs,” says the former dean of the School of Earth Sciences. “But the great thing about undergraduates is that they’ve got a million ideas and they love to run around and climb rocks and do all sorts of crazy things.”
That’s the kind of interaction between fledgling scholars and senior faculty supported by the Campaign for Undergraduate Education (CUE), which formally closed in December. Driven by recommendations of the 1994 report of the Commission on Undergraduate Education, the initiative raised more than $1.1 billion to endow research projects and intimate seminars, plus intensive study opportunities such as Sophomore College, Bing Honors College and Summer Research College. CUE endowed 48 new professorships, 41 faculty appointments in the Bass University Fellows in Undergraduate Education Program, 300 new need-based scholarship funds and 103 new athletic scholarship funds. The campaign supported the office of the vice provost for undergraduate education and helped revitalize the freshman humanities core, written and oral communication, foreign languages, overseas studies and public service.
Because of CUE, in 2004-05 the University was able to offer 204 introductory seminars that enrolled 2,331 students. In addition to involving undergraduates in his research projects, Ernst is also teaching two of this year’s sophomore seminars, Geologic Development of California, and Pangea, Germs and Arsenic. He thinks the format is unbeatable. “You learn geology by seeing it in the field,” he says. “I take kids to Big Sur, into the Diablo range, to the Klamath and to the Sierra, where I can show them rocks and ask questions.”
Sophomore Sam Urmy remembers the three field trips he took with Ernst last spring in the seminar that studied California’s geology. Along the San Andreas fault line, “you could see little pressure ridges and sags,” Urmy says. “There were all these little creeks that had been offset maybe 20 feet, right to left, where the fault ruptured in the 1857 earthquake—which is a place that’s mentioned in all the textbooks.” The earth systems major adds that the time he spent with Ernst, looking at rock samples through hand lenses, was equally memorable. “That was the first time I’d had a chance to really hang out with a professor away from campus,” he says. “He’s really nice, and very sort of goofy—he showed up to the earth systems Halloween party this year wearing a mask.”
Those field trips were “the first extended chance I had to get to know a professor,” concurs Kim Nicholas Cahill, who’s working on a doctorate in the interdisciplinary program in the environment and resources. Nicholas Cahill, ’99, credits Ernst for converting her from a human biology major into an earth systems one. “We’d be driving around and Gary would see an interesting outcrop, and stop and get out his hammer. He was so enthusiastic about it.”
She also participated in the White-Inyo project for two summers. “I didn’t have any grasp of how research would work in the real world,” says Nicholas Cahill. “I thought it would be arcane and complex, and rely on sophisticated equipment.” On their first morning, she and seven other undergraduates met in the parking lot to assemble their equipment—a compass, topographical maps, two lengths of clothesline, Sharpie markers, field guides and Ziploc bags. “We roped off big quadrants and learned how to identify plants and make visual estimates of how much sagebrush or grasses there were.” By the end of the day, Nicholas Cahill says, she was “sunburned, dehydrated, footsore—and ecstatic.”
