Bryn Mawr College

History

A Note on the History of Environmental Policy Studies at Bryn Mawr

Jane Kronick, emerita professor, GSSWSR

Environmental Studies at Bryn Mawr College began earlier than many realize, and in an unlikely place. In the early 1970's both William Vosburgh and Jane Kronick, faculty members in the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, spent a year in New Zealand during the time when New Zealand was implementing a radical new program, the Accident Compensation Act. This Act moved that nation substantially away from private market solutions to the problems of harm from hazardous materials in the environment whether in the workplace, the home or the community. The Act was particularly radical because it abolished the right to sue for injury and instead instituted a governmentally funded program of prevention of harm, restoration of damage and compensation for injury or death. In 1976, Jane Kronick, Principal Investigator, with William Vosburgh and an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional team of researchers received a National Science Foundation Grant to study the underlying philosophy and political process leading to this innovation. This was the first of a series of environmental grants this team received. The next grant examined the major laws establishing the environmental policy of the United States, the Clean Air Act, the Pure Water Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Public Health Act, among others. From the study of the hearings and submissions across many acts, the foundation of American environmental policy and its inadequacies were developed. This was followed by an analysis of the accident at Three Mile Island, a case study in the failure of prevention. The last grant in this series focused upon nuclear energy and the problems of nuclear waste disposal, completed in 1982. The people working on this project developed a series of policy courses that were taught in the School of Social Work. These courses, on the development of policy, the foundation of American policy, and the problems of occupational health all used environmental policy as the focus for the analysis. This research and these courses represented the first introduction of concern for environmental hazards in a School of Social Work in this nation. Jane Kronick also offered an undergraduate course in the political science department on environmental policy. Several students in Social Work completed PhD dissertations on environmental problems, including the careful study by Jane Donohue of the coalmine fire in Centralia, one of many fires burning in Pennsylvania in abandoned coal veins.

These investigators also took their concern for the environment to other institutions. Jane Kronick introduced this to the Social Work doctoral program at the University of Tennessee during the years she served as visiting professor there. Under her direction, Hussein Soliman completed a study of the contamination of the Pigeon River by the paper mills in North Carolina. Richard Gaskins completed the book, Environmental Accidents, while at the University of Chicago and continues currently to advise the New Zealand government on legal aspects of the Act and teach courses in the law school at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Miriam Vosburgh introduced this work into the courses she was teaching at Villanova University, as did John Orbell in the political science program at the University of Oregon. In the 1990's before retiring from the Bryn Mawr faculty, Jane Kronick held an IREX grant to examine environmental problems in the Czech Republic at the end of communism and introduce scholars at the University of Masaryk, Brno, to her method of studying environmental policy. So, for the 25-year period from the early 1970's until the mid 1990's, Bryn Mawr had a group of scholars heavily funded by NSF and NEH studying and teaching environmental policy as it existed in the US and in other nations.