The Nature of College

Most of the time, most of us don’t think of nature and college in the same sentence. Nature is nature, we think, and we find it best in wilderness areas like the Boundary Waters, or in state and national parks. College is culture and isn’t much connected to nature. When you come to college, you’re not generally thinking that you’re “getting back to nature.”

Sometimes when we think about nature and college, we think about science classes that explore nature in textbooks and classrooms and labs and fieldwork. Biology introduces us to the science of life. Chemistry compounds the complexity of matter and energy. Physics investigates space, time, matter and the structure of the universe. This is what we might call academic nature, and this scientific literacy is absolutely essential to informed choices—individual and institutional and political.