If an academic department changes its name to get away from its Latin roots and distance itself from its more earthy side, is it still grounded?
Northwestern administrators and professors recently renamed the earth and planetary sciences department, formerly known as the geological science department, to reflect the field’s expanding areas of study.
“An old view of geology is a guy with a hammer out on an outcrop somewhere, and today the people who are operating the Mars rover are geologists,” said Prof. Brad Sageman, the department’s chairman. “Part of a name change like this is trying to break that old stereotype.”
The department began working toward the name change earlier this academic year and already has begun using the new department name on some university services, such as the school directory and its own Web site.
“We thought it was a little more obvious for someone who was not familiar with Latin or Greek to just call it earth science instead of geological science,” Sageman said. “It’s just more clear and straightforward.”
The department has seen great faculty turnover, hiring a spate of new professors and planning to bring more lecturers next year. These new professors include Prof. Steve Jacobsen, whose Spring Quarter mineralogy and petrology course will use sample materials borrowed from NASA’s lunar sample collections, Sageman said.
The change includes new courses and concentrations within the department’s majors and minors. A new earth system science track requires fewer courses in quantitative mathematics and focuses on a broader range of interests, Sageman said. The department is also renumbering its courses to create five separate categories, making it easier for students to understand prerequisite and requirement sequences. Classes also will now be designated EARTH – not GEO_SCI – in the NU course catalog.
Northwestern joins many of its peer universities, including MIT, Harvard University and Columbia University, that have already replaced the geological sciences name.
The changes haven’t garnered much reaction from the department’s students, Sageman said.
Some students said the changes were mostly superficial and involved changes in name, rather than actual class material.
“It’s really the same classes,” Weinberg sophomore Sara Bosshart said. “What they were aiming for is getting more people that think only of rocks to realize that it’s more than that.”
– Christina Alexander
