Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business Administration and Vermont Law School will begin offering an exchange program for graduate students seeking either masters of business administration or masters of studies in environmental law degrees.
The arrangement - formally announced this week - allows Tuck students with an interest in environmental law to explore that field more fully at VLS, while VLS students will be able to take classes at Tuck which develop the relationship between business and the environment.
"Environment and business are not separate issues ... it's important for both disciplines to know about the other," Peter Miller, VLS director of relations, said.
While many of the classes at VLS deal with public policy and environmental legal issues, classes at the Tuck School highlight business decisions and their impact on the environment.
According to Associate Dean of the Tuck School Ken Baker, this will enable students from outside Tuck to study business and the environment from more of a "corporate perspective."
As the schools are only a short distance apart, the exchange program will run on a daily basis. Typically, students will drive the 30 minutes between campuses to attend classes twice a week.
Courses such as Federal Natural Resource Law, Administrative Law and the Law of Toxic and Hazardous Pollutants will be open at VLS to Tuck students, Miller said.
At the Tuck School, Environmental Economics and Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing and Design will help to expose the business-side of environmental law to VLS students.
Currently, three Tuck students are enrolled in classes at VLS, and it has been their experiences that drove the formation of this program.
"They [the Tuck students] were in a sense guinea pigs for this program," Baker said.
Baker expects only a handful of Tuck students to enroll in this program in the next year. He added that the variations in the academic calendar of the two schools - VLS is on a semester system while Tuck is on a trimester system - is an area of concern in organizing the exchange program.
Currently, VLS offers similar exchange programs to Dartmouth's other two professional schools - the Thayer School of Engineering and the Dartmouth Medical School.
The Tuck School also operates a term-long exchange program with the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
