William Goldfarb Interview

Interview with WIlliam Goldfarb
Date of Interview: October 31, 2003
Interviewer: Rob Teeter
Transcriber: Brian Guelich

Q: Feel free to begin with any that comes to mind about Cook College .

WG: My name is William Goldfarb. I've been a professor of Environmental Law at Cook College since 1974. I can remember when I first heard about Cook College . I was teaching Humanities at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken and was in the midst of my second career change. I had gone to college with majors in philosophy and English and then entered law school because I had always expected to be an attorney. My father was an attorney and I had really never thought twice about what I was going to be professionally. I didn't like law school, I didn't enjoy it but I felt it was a means to an end, a necessary path for getting to my destiny as an attorney. I felt that once I got out into actual practice, which I thought would be interesting, that everything would be o.k.

After graduating from law school I practiced general law in NYC with a medium-sized firm for 5 years and it was interesting because I learned many different fields of law and represented many different kinds of clients, but I felt I had to specialize. So after 5 years of general practice in NYC, I joined a firm of corporate lawyers, Stockholders Derivative Action, based on stock fraud and directorial officer misconduct, Enron-type stuff. That was really interesting too and it was a public service because we were exposing defaulting, delinquent corporate officials and we were getting public exposure and we were getting a lot of money for certain members of the public. But after a year of that I came to the realization that I really did not want to be a practicing lawyer, that I wanted to teach at a University. And I knew that in order to do that I had to go back to graduate school because I wanted to be a literature professor, that was one of my undergraduate majors.

So, I entered Columbia University full-time in the Masters program and continued to practice law part-time. In order to practice part-time, I formed my own law firm with two partners who were full-time. One of the partners was an old law school friend of mine, the other was a friend of his and we did mostly corporate and estates work. As I said, I practiced law part-time and they were full-time. That worked out quite well, and I got my masters degree and then went on for the PhD. That part-time law/full-time literature graduate education went on for about three or four years, until I had passed all my qualifying examinations in English. I decided that I really wanted to get a job in literature and stop practicing law. So while I was working on my dissertation, which incidentally was on Dickens and the law, I got a job teaching part-time at Stevens in the Humanities Department. That was interesting because we were teaching Greek literature and philosophy at that time. I enjoyed doing that, but that was the days of the Vietnam War and there was a lot of campus unrest and I became the campus draft counselor, because I was the only faculty member with a law degree. That was exciting and controversial and interesting, but let's fast forward to April 1970 when I had finally gotten a full-time job at Stevens. I had been there two years part-time and still working on my doctoral dissertation. I was hired full-time partly because of having accepted the draft councilor job. So I was full-time at Stevens in my third year, and all of a sudden there was the first Earth Day.

Environmental protection was a strong impulse at Stevens Tech because the students were interested in the environment and waste treatment. They were engineers and scientists and it was a surprisingly strong interest in environmental protection there. The students re-enacted the burial of the Hudson River . They held a funeral ceremony and had a funeral procession for the Hudson River . They built a coffin out of papier-mâché, a huge coffin, and there were over a hundred students in the funeral procession. Everybody dressed in black and it was very, very effective. They were holding signs and Stevens Tech is right on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River , so it was a fitting place to hold this ceremony. Coincidentally, I was also becoming involved in the environmental movement and the reason was that I had been a fisherman since very early youth, starting from the age of three I went fishing with my grandfather. In college, I got into fly-fishing which has become a life long obsession with me. At Colgate we used to fish right behind the fraternity house, there was a trout stream behind our fraternity house. So I learned how to fly fish there and I carried that through in law school and that was my major source of recreation. Through the fly-fishing late in the 1960's, I began to do some volunteer legal consulting for the Isaac Walton League. So even before the environmental movement I was involved in water pollution control and scenic rivers work and the like. So Earth Day came at a time where I was myself, individually, becoming involved with environmental protection. As this procession wound itself around my building, I decided I really wanted to be a part of this, so I went downstairs and joined the line of mourners. That day I decided, it was really a kind of conversion, I decided that I don't want to be a practicing lawyer but I want to be part of the environmental movement and the way I can really be a part of it is with something to do with environmental law. I was also at the time becoming involved with the Clean Water Act and NEPA and the Clean Air Act and I was working with some lobbyist with the Isaac Walton League on a new Clean Water Act which was actually enacted in 1972. So I was becoming involved privately and here I had a chance to do it professionally.

What that meant was another career change, from literature back to the law, but into another part of the law which didn't exist when I was practicing during the'60's and which I knew was very important to me and this society. A lot of my colleagues and friends told me that I was crazy, that I had a promising career that I was foregoing in literary studies and that environmental law was bad and the environmental movement was bad. I disagreed and I did it anyway, but I did it in a rather cautious way. That is I introduced a course at Stevens Tech in 1971, a course for undergraduates in environmental law, and it was the first undergraduate course in environmental law in the country. There are now dozens of them, but that was the first and it was very popular among the students. As a matter of fact, one of the students who took my first environmental law class in 1971 is still working with the New Jersey DEP Air Quality Division in Trenton . In fact, he is the director, Bill O' Sullivan, and he stills complains to me about getting a low grade, but we won't talk anymore about that. So I introduced the course. I continued to teach two humanities courses a semester and the environmental law course. The environmental law course was very, very important and very popular, and it was closed that year and the next year. Fast forward again to 1973, I still hadn't finished my dissertation, still hadn't defended my dissertation because at that point I didn't feel that I needed it any longer. I was going back into the law so why should I finish the dissertation?

At that point in 1973, I heard about Cook College . How I heard about it was interesting. I was assistant director of a technology and society program at Stevens, in addition to being a humanities professor, and the director was someone I didn't like, I didn't respect, and I couldn't work with, so it was clear one of us had to go. One day he walked into my office with a leaflet and it was a job announcement from Cook College , Rutgers University . They were hiring an environmental attorney as a faculty member. It turned out that one of the Cook faculty at that time, Dr. Calvin Stillman, an economist in the new Natural Resources Dept., knew one of the fathers of environmental law, David Sive, and felt that it would be important to have a lawyer teach non-law environmental studies students. So he was the chair of the search committee. When I saw this job announcement I called Dr. Stillman and he said, “Come in, let's meet.” I drove down to New Brunswick to the trailer that still exists on College Farm Road , which is where the Natural Resource Department was housed, down past the barns, where the Cook computing program is. That trailer right on College Farm Road . used to be the Environmental Resources Department until it was moved to this building. I met the faculty there and I was really impressed and I think they were too and so I threw my name into the hopper for the search. The chairman of the department at the time said, “Bill you've got a really good shot to make the short list for the hiring for this position, but it would really be in your interest to have a PhD. Even though you won't be teaching humanities and even though you won't be teaching English, the PhD is a union card at the undergraduate university area, so you will get much more respect because you have a PhD.” So at that point, I buckled down and finished my dissertation and had a defense date for May. I came down and gave a paper here and I got the job starting in September of 1974. This took place in the spring of '74, my seminars and the hiring process. So, I resigned from Stevens and came to Cook College in 1974.

I came to Cook College for a number of reasons, it wasn't only negative, that I couldn't get along with the Director of Technology and Society, because I had a lot of other things going for me at Stevens and they really wanted me to stay, but Cook offered opportunities that were unparalleled. There was an opportunity to start a new college from the ground up, without any traditions, without the usual politics, without ingrained disciplines. And another part of the opportunity was the multi-disciplinary major. The founders of Cook College, who were really wise and visionary, had in mind multi-disciplinary departments, multi-disciplinary trans-departmental curricula, a common first year course in agriculture and the environment, new courses in environmental law for non-lawyers, in environmental policy and environmental economics. I listened to the presentations of the founders, some of whom are still here. Dick Merritt is still here and Bruce Hamilton is still here and some of the founders of the college, people who presided over the transition from the College of Agriculture and Environmental Science to Cook College , are still around and that is wonderful. I heard what they had to say and they really were visionary. I wanted to come because of the opportunity to create an intellectual and social entity that was unconventional. Also there was money available to set up new kinds of programs, new institutes and laboratories and to do a lot of things that were creative and unorthodox at the time. In fact, that has worked, I have been very happy. Also I thought the students at Cook would be less narrow than the students at Stevens because students at Stevens were very much focused on engineering and science, mostly engineering. I liked the fact that there was a liberal arts element as part of the Cook College curriculum. There was the Department of Humanities and Communications that would deal with environmental communications and environmental humanities, people like Dr. Goff. Dean Goff is one of the founders and she is English major. Dr. Mattro, retiring this year, is head of the Cook Honors Program, was an English PhD. These were people I could talk literature with and, in fact, I did. In the early years here, before the Cook demand for environmental law became so strong, I was teaching Environmental Humanities. I taught Ideas of Nature , Humanities of the Environment . So here was a place I could do both, I could do Environmental Law, I could do Environmental Humanities and I could be part of a new intellectual academic endeavor that, as far as I knew, didn't exist anywhere else in the country. That was the plus side.

The minus side of coming to Cook College was the agriculture aspect of it. Not that there is anything wrong with agriculture, but I thought that there might be a problem grafting an environmental trunk on an agricultural root because the two groups didn't always see eye to eye, like pesticides. Most agriculture people used pesticides almost indiscriminately, where in the environmental movement's early days, when Rachel Carson was really anti-pesticide use and anti-high input agriculture, there seemed to be a major conflict between large corporate high energy intensity, highly polluting agriculture and an environmental protection college. And in fact, it has turned out that is one of the conflicts, the dissonances that have impeded Cook College until about the last ten years. Until agriculture began to decline in the state to the point that environmental protection could win out, there was a constant battle between agriculture and environmental protection and the people who were doing production agriculture here and the people who were doing environmental protection.

So that was one problem that I correctly identified at the beginning, but the educational opportunities far outweighed that, and over the last thirty years I have been very happy that I made the switch. I've been happy here, and I think Cook College is a wonderful place; the student body is high quality and well motivated, interested, interesting people, versatile people. I am happy with my faculty colleagues, they're inter-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary, and they care about undergraduate education to a much greater extent than faculty throughout the rest of the university do. There is the Cook atmosphere, a student-centered atmosphere, faculty availability, accessibility atmosphere. It's legendary, but it's true. I am afraid it's disappearing, but I'll discuss that in a few minutes. It's true and it should be preserved, and it's good for everybody.

I like the land grant concept, one the reasons also that I came to Cook College , I was sold on by the founders. I didn't know much about land grant universities before I came here for a visit. I learned about and I love the land grant model. I wanted to be a land grant professor; a combination of teaching, focused applied research and extension to me was a brilliant innovative concept. And the more I read about it the more I heard about it the more I thought it was great and the more I wanted to be part of that. Of course, I could see problems because you had agriculture dominating the educational institution and maybe there was too much deference paid to the economic agricultural production needs and not enough to environmental protection, but still I thought the model was a great one. And it is, and that is something that should really be preserved. It has been great to be a land grant professor. One of the best things about Cook College is having the Agricultural Experiment Station. It's great for students, it's great for faculty, and it's great for citizens of the state. The land grant outreach model is super. I am glad to see the new president, McCormick, is taking advantage of Cook's outreach activities and trying to extend that model to the rest of the university. So, land grand university was one, the educational opportunities, the interesting faculty, the environmental focus, the student body, and the beauty of the campus. This is a very beautiful campus; I think it's been over-built in many ways but it is a beautiful campus located in an urban setting. So, for all those reasons I decided to come here and I have never regretted that decision. It has been a really good 30 years for me; I hope I have made a contribution commensurate with my enjoyment and my professional satisfaction.

There have been some problems at Cook College . On balance it has been a very positive experience for me but there have been some problems. One of them was the agriculture/environmental split, but that's over because agriculture has changed and expectations have changed to the point that agriculture now in New Jersey is not what is was in 1974. Another problem, until fairly recently, was the inability to do multi-disciplinary research. Another reason that I came here was that I learned very early that the only way to solve environmental problems is to work in multi-disciplinary teams. The problems are so complex and multi-faceted that you have to work in multi-disciplinary teams. That was really reinforced the first year I came to Cook College in 1974. My department chair, Grant Walton, who later became the dean and one of the strongest influences on my career, had been, before coming to Cook, a division director with New Jersey DEP, director of the Water Resources Division, and he said “Look, as part of your outreach activities, as part of your research, why don't you spend some time with the Water Resources Division on the NJ DEP. Why don't you spend one day a week there?” I said, “Grant, I think that is a great idea I would love to do that.” So, as soon as I came here I began spending one day a week as an unpaid special consultant with the NJ DEP. In that capacity I got to work with everybody in the agency, really multi-disciplinary problem solving. What we did was, we drafted the NJ Water Pollution Control Act and the NJ Safe Drinking Water Act and we worked with the legislature and with people from all kinds of professions and disciplines within the water resources area. I got a lot of experience and that fed my research because I learned about the legal problems first hand then went and researched them and wrote about them. I wrote some really influential papers that were inspired by work with NJ DEP. That convinced me that multi-disciplinary research is the only way to address environmental problems, but it is difficult to do that at the college. It has been difficult until very recently. Why? Even in spite of the fact that Cook made a serious, sincere attempt to have multi-disciplinary departments and curricula they were fighting against an entrenched academic tradition of disciplines, of disciplinary criteria, of highly focused individualized research. The academic research model comes from graduate education. Graduate education is individual. One person writes a master's, one person writes a doctorate, one person defends it. That to me is an outdated model, I think it is obsolete, I think universities should put much more emphasis towards multi-disciplinary, co-operative group graduate dissertations, but academia is very slow to change. That individual model benefits a lot of people. At any rate, that's the model of academic research and it was very hard to get multi-disciplinary research going. There weren't any incentives, there weren't any rewards, and there wasn't any money. In addition, what the University rewards is quick, single-author publications. That is contrary to multi-disciplinary research, which takes a long time. There are group dynamics, you've got to get the group together, you've go to fund it, the topic is more complex, it's not the quick single experiment paper that gets you a credential, a CV, and you can put it down as a number. Unfortunately, that is what the University values. I think the University's values are wayward. So, for many years most multi-disciplinary research was theoretically encouraged, but in practice discouraged because you weren't rewarded for it, there wasn't any money for it, there wasn't enough time for it, there was question about who was going to publish the results. The reward system was not congruent with multi-disciplinary research and still is not, although things have improved a great deal. It wasn't until Dean Adelaja , who unfortunately is leaving, became dean of research and began to offer real incentives, grants, mini-grants for multi-disciplinary research, that we began to get meaningful multi-disciplinary research here. That was only recently. Now I hope this continues because I say I think we are 30 years behind the times at the University doing multi-disciplinary problem-oriented research.

There is another bias at the University against applied research. The University is biased toward basic, fundamental, big science for which you might get a Nobel Prize. The applied research, the problem solving, nitty-gritty research is not nearly as important in the University's estimation. So it is hard to do multi-disciplinary applied research at Cook College or elsewhere in the University. It is easier at Cook but it is still difficult. So that has been one of my frustrations here, that I have only been able to do about 3 or 4 really multi-disciplinary research products in my 30 years at the University. I have done a lot of multi-disciplinary work but it has been outside the University; colleagues at other universities that I have done it with, but I have done some good multi-disciplinary work here at the University lately. One of the reasons that I was able to do that was, about ten years ago I had always been in the Natural Resources Department., which is multi-disciplinary, but multi-disciplinary social science, very little science involved. About ten years ago I realized that if I was really going to get anything done in terms of multi-disciplinary work, I had to be in a science department. So, at that point, my old department Natural Resources was going to merge with the Ecology Dept., to form Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources. I really didn't want to be part of that, I wanted to be part of Environmental Sciences, and so we were given a window of opportunity to switch departments, and I did. I switched departments and I am now the only policy person in a science department of 26. It has been a wonderful experience because I have educated my colleagues and they have educated me and we have done some really important multi-disciplinary research. I have done some work on sewage/sludge disposal with an engineer and a scientist here that has been highly influential and very interesting to me. It is just too bad that I had to spend twenty years incapable of doing multi-disciplinary research. The only way you can get multi-disciplinary research going is by talking to people in the halls, going to meetings, you can't do it by large structures and schools and institutes. I don't believe in them, I believe in actual day to day contacts, and that's the way it works. By rubbing elbows with the scientists, and finding out what they're doing and telling them what I'm doing, we have mutual interests we have mutual address of problems collaboratively, that's the way it had to work. My model has worked. It's just too bad that I had to wait twenty years for that to happen. During the last ten years things have gotten much better. What I would like to see at Cook College is fully multi-disciplinary departments. We have some very good environmental social scientists in the Human Ecology Department, but they are in the wrong place. They talk to each other; they don't talk to the scientists and the engineers. I would say disperse that department, break it up and put all those really terrific people in with the scientists. Then we will really get some problem solving and I think that I have proven that that's the model that works. So, fully multi-disciplinary departments, which would be going against the academic disciplinary grain and it may not be acceptable downtown, but I think that's what we should fight for, and I think we should fight for the preservation of the multi-disciplinary curriculum and we should fight for the Perspectives Course.

I think the major problem facing the College and the major problem facing the University as a whole, and that is the eclipse of teaching by research, by funded research. The most important priority for this University is funded research, which results in publications. The overhead, the professional repetition is what gets you promoted. Teaching doesn't get you promoted, I mean, I think you have to be an adequate teacher to get promoted, but no more than mediocre if your research is terrific and if you are heavily funded. What that means is that assistant professors that just entered the college get the wrong ideas. They get the idea that they really should teach as little as possible. As a matter of fact, one of the tensions is that as mentors of these people we have to tell them to teach as little as possible because their careers are at stake and their careers depend on building up research funding and getting out the publications. So, we will have an assistant professor who teaches at most one course a semester. I think that is outrageous. I think everybody should teach at least 2 maybe even 3 courses a semester and still be required to do some research, but that runs against the expectations of Rutgers University right now. This is a research university. The University makes no pretenses of being a teaching university, it declares it self as a state research university. I oppose that, I think that the most important role of the State University is to educate the students of the state, both undergraduate and graduate, and that bringing in research funding and producing esoteric research papers is not as important as that. So, I'm a radical that I simply disagree with the University's priorities, and unfortunately the young faculty that we hire at Cook are folks that want to teach and could care about teaching. Yet they get very little teaching experience and very little student contact and what they learn is: research, publications, proposals, get promoted and maybe teach later, but when later comes around they are doing more research more proposals and supervising more graduate students and they haven't got time to teach anything but small graduate seminars. That I think is tragic, because the Cook dedication to education, especially undergraduate education and students, is disappearing and it's disappearing because of the University, not because the College has changed. The College is fighting a kind of rear guard battle to maintain that philosophy. They can't do it for long. As the old guard retires, those with tenure who can afford to buck the tide, as we retire the people we hire will not be able to commit themselves to teaching. So, I think if Cook is going to survive with the atmosphere and the philosophy that it has always had, and have tried very hard to preserve, the University has got to change first, and that may happen because of money. The citizens may demand a decent education for their children and not that they get taught by graduate students.

So there you have it, on the whole, it has been a very pleasant experience. I am fiercely loyal to Cook College and when I retire next year after 30 years at Cook and 5 years of teaching at other universities that will be 35 years of university teaching, I will have lots of positive and pleasant memories to take with me. So, I am very happy that I came here. I hope that Cook can overcome the problems that beset it right now, which are basically not of its making, and I will always be a friend of the college and I will do whatever I can to help the college achieve its goals in the future. It has been a great career for me.

Q: How much of a change have you seen in the enrollment in the Environmental Law course?

WG: It has increased too much. Over the first ten years the registration went up from about 20 to 120. I reached the point where I said to myself, and a dean said to me, I met with the Dean of Instruction, and he basically said, “Bill you have got to one of two things with this course. You've got to either package and manage it as a large lecture course with graduate students handling smaller groups,” and I would give lectures, like your Calculus or Biology courses. “Or,” he said, “you've got to think smaller.” I thought about it, I'm a smaller class person. I like the personal contact, I like the questions and answers, I like to teach my own class and grade my own papers, I don't like machine grading. Also, I would have had a very difficult time getting graduate students because law students don't want to do this and there are no law students on the New Brunswick campus. One of the problems I had had was getting research assistants because I don't bring in money. Law professors automatically get research assistants. I don't bring in grants so I can't hire research assistants and there are no law students on this campus. So, I can't get young law students to help me write my articles, which are written for law journals. So I haven't published nearly as much as people might expect because I haven't had the help. I have a respectable publication record, especially the textbook which I have spent a lot of my time on because to me the textbook is the most important thing I have ever done because that has tremendous influence. One hundred and fifty universities adopted that textbook and it really does mold the field and influence people. So, I have spent a lot of time on the textbook but textbooks aren't highly valued by this University because they are not published in peer-reviewed journals. Getting back to the size of the course, it was up to about a 120 and I couldn't handle it. I was just working too hard to try to manage the course, so instead of making it bigger and repackaging, I decided to make it smaller. How did I make it smaller? I impose a prerequisite; about ten years ago I imposed the political science prerequisite. That I think worked out very well for me because the students I get are more sophisticated, politically. The downside of that is that there are students who want to take the course that can't, but you can't win them all. So I got to maintain it at a 30-40 student level, which is where I want it. Thirty-five students is a manageable mid-size course, 50 students is a large offering, that's where their break off is. So I have reduced the size because I didn't want a huge course. The demand is there. The demand is there for the Environmental Law course.

I'm kind of sad about the fact I developed another course, which I was asked to develop when I came in, for the Natural Resource Management curriculum, which at that time was one of the biggest curricula here and had hundreds of people. Wildlife people, fisheries people, silviculture people, parks management people. So I developed a really innovative course, Legal Aspects of Conservation. I taught about western national parks and forests and did something with New Jersey conservation, but mostly western. That course was extremely popular for a long time, mostly with the Natural Resource Management students but also with the EPIB students. One of the sad things that have happened with this college is that the Natural Resource Management curriculum has declined almost to the point where it is invisible. That's a result of decreasing student demand and fewer jobs but also the retirement and non-replacement of faculty like Prof. Applegate and Prof. Wolgast and Prof. Kuser. All these folks have retired and they are the ones who built this curriculum. So it finally got to the point that Legal Aspects of Conservation had such a small enrollment that I decided to abolish it. So, I don't teach it any more because the demand isn't there. Demand for Environmental Law is higher than it's always and ever been but Legal Aspects of Conservation, there aren't enough Natural Resource Management students to make the course worthwhile and there aren't enough EPIB's to bring it up to the level I need. I'd like to see the University revive, make a real commitment to the Natural Resources curricula and rebuild that. If the University wants to do that it can. We have in this department, Environmental Sciences, we have Environmental Engineering, a new curriculum, great. This is super to have a real environmental engineering curriculum based here. We are doing this in co-operation with the School of Engineering but it's based here. There is a real demand out there for Environmental Engineers; it is a profession that is important now and will become even larger in the future. The University has provided tremendous funding and made a wonderfully serious commitment to build a new program. We are already one of the major Environmental Engineering curriculum programs on the east coast. So when the University wants to make a commitment to fund a set discipline it can. That's what I think the University should do with Natural Resources Management because that curriculum is in trouble right now. It has always been one of the hearts of Cook College , as has Environmental Sciences. The first environmental science program in the country started in 1926. So we have a long and productive history.

Q: Have you had any students that really stick in your mind, if they went on after Cook and where they went?

WG: Oh yeah, I ‘m still friendly with some of them. I fish with some of them. I don't think mentioning names is appropriate but one of them is very high up in the United States Justice Department, in the Environmental Criminal Enforcement Division. He has accomplished a great deal. Another one is high ranking staff to the House Agriculture Committee and he has done a lot with pesticide work and integrated pest management, and money for farmers who are good stewards of the land. One of my former students is a good friend and fishing buddy and is Director of Division of Fish & Wildlife for the NJ DEP. He is also a lawyer, went to law school for environmental law. A lot of them are working in law firms, a number work for NGO's like Environmental Defense. Dozens of them stand out in my mind. These are folks who I still talk to on a regular basis. I am very proud of my former students.