Harvard faculty voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to approve a new interdisciplinary “Energy, Climate, and Environment” concentration, set to launch in the 2026-27 academic year — even as some professors warned that its success will depend on resources and coordination.
The new program will draw on courses across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, joining existing environmental concentrations such as Environmental Science and Engineering and Environmental Science and Public Policy. But faculty said it is designed to further these efforts, integrating multiple approaches to climate and energy challenges within a single framework.
Organized into four tracks spanning the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ divisions, the program aims to equip students with both disciplinary depth and cross-disciplinary fluency. It builds on “ENCE 10: Gateway to Energy, Climate and Environment,” a pilot course offered this spring that drew roughly 16 students.
Faculty voted 215 to 3 to approve the concentration, which has been in the works for nearly five years, according to physics professor Lene V. Hau. The concentration will undergo a faculty council review within five years, with a report presented to the full faculty.
The curriculum centers on a two-course introductory sequence — ENCE 10 and ENCE 51. ENCE 51 will examine the “values, assumptions, and ideological commitments” underlying environmental challenges. Students will also complete ENCE-100, a senior capstone focused on team-based projects.
From there, concentrators will choose one of our four tracks: Nature, Ethics, and the Human Imagination; Science and Engineering for Sustainable Solutions; Markets, Politics, and Societies; or Climate and Biodiversity.
In the proposal, faculty emphasized that the program is not intended to produce generalists, but specialists who can collaborate across fields.
“To be effective, those leaders will need both a strong grounding in the methods and tools used in specific areas of specialization and a literacy in relevant and complementary fields outside their own area of expertise,” they wrote.
“In other words, our aim is not to graduate interdisciplinary students but rather students who have developed deep field expertise and a multidisciplinary perspective and who understand the value of and are well prepared for working effectively with experts outside their own field,” they added.
Despite near-unanimous support, several professors raised concerns about how the program will be implemented.
Organismic and Evolutionary Biology professor Noel “Missy” Holbrook said at the meeting that she supported an ENCE concentration, but warned that it is launching without clearly defined funding commitments or a clear enough plan for cross-department coordination.
“This is hard. All the faculty who put this together know this is hard, and it will take coordination,” Holbrook said. “The ENCE proposal enters a field with four other current concentrations that address climate, and we do need to work together.”
She also pointed to peer institutions where similar interdisciplinary programs were backed by significant investments. At Stanford University, for example, a new environmental social sciences department launched alongside expanded staffing and course offerings, according to The Stanford Daily — a level of support that would require substantial funding at Harvard.
The proposal has also drawn criticism from some Environmental Science and Public Policy concentrators, who argue the University should prioritize strengthening existing programs rather than creating a new one.
In an open letter, Cassandra L. Swartz ’26 and Pranav S. Moudgalya ’26 warned that the new concentration could fragment Harvard’s environmental curriculum.
“To the extent ENCE draws students away from existing programs, the effect is fragmentation: more programs, each smaller and less internally diverse,” they wrote. “Each program would grow smaller, more homogeneous, and less capable of generating the cross-disciplinary friction that is central to meaningful learning.”
They also questioned whether Harvard could sustain a new concentration amid broader financial pressures, pointing to recent layoffs at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences this spring.
“This is not the moment to add institutional overhead; it is the moment to consolidate and strengthen what we already have,” they wrote.
Still, Swartz and Moudgalya wrote in a Tuesday statement that they support the University’s broader goals and hope ENCE will complement — rather than compete with — existing offerings.
“Our concerns were never about whether Harvard should do more—it absolutely should—but about how,” they wrote. “We hope the administration will invest in existing programs alongside ENCE, not at their expense. We look forward to being constructive voices as the concentration takes shape.”
—Staff writer Abigail S. Gerstein can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at abbysg.97. Follow her on X @abbysgerstein.
—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at amannsm.38. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.