Teranes and Muir College Provost Wayne Yang served as co-chairs of the inaugural workgroup, which included 10 other members. To build a strong foundation for the proposal, the workgroup engaged with a broad range of faculty, administration, and students across campus.
They drew inspiration from UC San Diego’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) requirement, which was implemented in 2011 and mandates that all undergraduates take and pass at least one approved DEI course before graduating. While there is no single template, approved DEI courses are designed to critically engage students with topics on race, power, and anti-racist efforts that meaningfully challenge structural racism.
“We took the best learnings from the DEI requirement—which Jane was also involved with—ensuring that the requirement does not add additional time to degree for students,” said Yang. “The climate requirement incentivizes and encourages faculty to integrate climate change education into their upper division courses, and thus deepens the curriculum by focusing on what students can actually do about climate change from their disciplines. Importantly, it treats climate change as an interdisciplinary issue.”
The workgroup determined that a course must focus at least 30% of its content on climate change to be eligible for approval to satisfy the JTCCER. These approved courses invite students to examine the complex nature of climate change and potential solutions—such as mitigation, adaptation, and justice—from a variety of perspectives, including scientific, technical, cultural, psychological, political, and economic.
“Hypothetically, we could envision that engineering students might want to take a course in their major that lets them think about how to build sustainable widgets, while political science students might seek courses in their major that explore policy implications related to sustainability,” said Sarah Gille, a Scripps professor and physical oceanographer who served on the workgroup. “Other students might want to take courses outside their major for a broader view of the world.”
Honoring a Climate Champion
Amid the effort to finalize the proposal, Teranes unexpectedly fell ill and passed away in July 2022. Devastated by the loss of their colleague and friend, the workgroup members felt it was only fitting to name the climate requirement in her memory.
