BF: You’ve been lucky that you’ve been able to avoid falling into that trap, and that your experience appears to have been almost seamless in that you’ve been able to fulfill your role as a very active and involved working woman, while being able to raise a family at the same time.
VW: (laughing) Not exactly seamless. A lot of juggling and a lot of scrambling. It’s sometimes hard to fill all those roles. But one thing that’s been so good for me is that I have a flexible schedule in that my research and writing can be done anywhere and at any time. I can work at night. I often do. The computer has really changed things.
BF: I think people will be interested in your research. I know you write about the environment and pesticides. I’m curious how this relates to our program—for example our course in law and the environment. Do you find that when you teach students who take it that you’re preaching to the converted, or are you more the Pied Piper introducing them to the issues?
VW: I think it’s more like preaching to the converted. But I think that people who take “Law and the Environment” are predisposed to care about the environment, but they haven’t really been exposed to a lot of the issues in environmental law coming in, so I have them read things that make them think about the issues. There’s no way, actually, to teach environmental law per se. It’s so broad. We have the Clean Air Act. We have TOSCA, the Toxic Substances Control Act. We have the Clean Water Act. We have the federal pesticides law, and many other important environmental laws from this past century. There’s so much legislation and so much case law that is environmental law that there’s almost no way to teach it in one semester. I have a textbook that has chapters on each bill. But what you really want to know is what are the issues to be thinking about. The issues to think about involve how to regulate, in a legal sense. Do you incentivize people? Do you give them money to get them to do what you want them to do, like with “Cash for Clunkers?” Or do you command them to behave within limits? And how do we measure what risk as a society we’re willing to take on regarding health issues? I write about pesticide regulation, but I also write about risk assessment and toxics regulation. So how do you determine what level of risk we as a society are willing to take on? And what about the science behind it? Is it really science or is it politics? Those are the issues that I write about. I have my students read books that make them think about these issues. What risk is society willing to accept as it regulates toxic chemicals? Should we be deciding that one person in a million can die? And what about the aggregate risks? We don’t really have the ability to measure aggregate risks from all the chemicals to which we are exposed. So what should our approach be? Should we be precautionary? There’s a whole school of thought that says we should behave in a precautionary manner, that we shouldn’t do certain things, because we don’t know the effects. And we’ll never know. That’s the school of thought in line with what is called the “precautionary principle.” That’s the school of thought I lean toward.
BF: You raise all these questions. The first reaction I have is, “Who’s listening and who’s going to answer them?”
VW: Nobody (laughs). But we discuss the issues and think about them.
BF: And you’re raising the consciousness of the students.
VW: That’s what I try to do, raise consciousness.
BF: I think that’s the role of any teacher—in any subject.
VW: I hope so. You have to teach students what questions to ask. What are the issues? What are the things to think about in the field?
BF: It sounds as if you’re learning from your students as much as you’re teaching them.
VW: Yes. We’re asking questions together.
BF: Your interest in the environment predates—by a lot—the current focus on sustainability.
VW: Yes. It does. And modern environmentalism itself goes back, I would say, to the 60’s.
BF: To Rachel Carson and “Silent Spring.”
VW: Yes, in fact that’s a book we read in my class. She’s generally credited with beginning the modern environmental movement. You probably would like to know how I got interested in it myself.
BF: That was my next question, actually.
VW: It’s interesting. There are two answers to the question, actually. I got interested in it in kind of a crazy way. I grew up behind an easement that was owned by an electric company and the electric company came to the neighborhood (I wasn’t even living there) and they wanted to spray herbicides across this broad swath of land to kill the foliage because it had grown so high—they had not maintained it—and my mother waged an all-out war, a county-wide war, on the electric company, saying, “You cannot do this. It’s poisonous.” This was in 1992, a long time ago. They came to the door to ask permission to spray some synthetic chemical. And my mother led an all-out war to stop it.
BF: Where was this?
VW: In Rockland County. She was in the newspaper and actually won an award for this fight. She was one of a major corporation’s “Fifty Women of the Year.” She gave me some things to read on pesticides and the regulation of pesticides and I became fascinated. I was shocked that we were using these chemicals indiscriminately. In 1995, I wrote my first paper, published in 1996, on the use of these pesticide chemicals in schools. I didn’t think it was a good idea to be using them in schools. But what was interesting—and this is the second part of the answer to your question—is that when I wrote it, it was a little bit of a novel idea. It doesn’t seem so now, but when I wrote it in ’96, people thought I was asking for too much, that we would never stop using pesticides in the schools. They would say, “Of course we’re going to use bug spray in the schools.” Well, guess what. In New York State, they generally don’t use them any more. They’re not allowed to spray toxic chemicals in public buildings on a broad scale. In 1996, spraying pesticides and using pesticides in public buildings, including schools, was routinely done. And schoolchildren were being exposed to pesticide chemicals.
BF: And that doesn’t seem all that long ago.
VW: So the corollary to this is that every time I write something on a toxics regulation issue, it’s a little “out there.” And that’s kind of where you want to be. You want to be a little out there. But when you’re writing something that’s a little on the fringes of common thought, it’s a little scary.
BF: Which brings me to your writing on Sarbanes-Oxley.
VW: Yes, that was a little out of the mainstream too. I was highly critical of Sarbanes-Oxley. I was highly critical of the whistleblower provisions because I didn’t think they were protective of the people who were blowing the whistle. And I was one of the first commentators to say that they were outrageously weak and not protective. Other law professors have since said-- have agreed with me--that they’re not protective, and that if you want people who are inside the companies to report on the fraud, then you have to protect them. In that article, I quote statistics that I got from the Department of Justice in 2006 which said that only four people who filed actions were successful as whistleblowers, a ridiculously low number. Everybody else had failed in their whistleblower actions. They were fired. Then they filed these actions and they lost. They couldn’t win. So I was highly critical of that regime. It wasn’t environmental in the least but I did it because I became interested in it, and it related to my teaching in the Law of Business Organizations course. I just thought it was outrageous. And it was on the fringe to say that at the time. But others have followed suit.
BF: So you’re a trailblazer.
VW: Well, I try to say something that someone else hasn’t said before. But it’s a little bit of a risk.
BF: To be out there.
VW: Yes, when you’re doing it, it’s a little scary. But when people start to follow you and agree with you later it’s a good feeling.
BF: Speaking of good feeling—or feeling good, really—when do you find time in your very full life for tennis?
VW: I try to play through the winter and really play a lot in the summer.
BF: Like with everything else, you try to give it 100%.
VW: I try. I’m also very demanding of my students in the classroom because I always say to them, “I give you 100% when I’m in this room. I want no less from you.” And you’d be surprised. They give it back. There’s not a peep in my classroom—unless they’re supposed to be talking, of course.
BF: Speaking of talking, we should also talk about your very active involvement on campus—in the Zicklin summer seminar, in our assessment activities, in Middle States….all the things that reveal your deep commitment to the College and the Zicklin School.
VW: I did the summer seminar because I have a deep commitment to teaching. I want to be as good as I can in the classroom and it sounded like it would be really interesting work. We read great books about what it means to be a good college teacher. It was a great group, and lovely to reach across the disciplines and work with other faculty. We each taught the others a lesson. I learned about finance, marketing, and other exciting things. And then we carried what we learned forward and talked about it with our departments and tried to share what we learned in the seminar so those who were not there might benefit from the work we had done there. We talked mostly about active teaching—getting students involved. Everyone learns differently and for some, it can be hard to sit in a lecture for an hour. I don’t like to do that with students. What I do is break my class up into sections. I might do fifteen minutes of lecture, and then we’ll do some problems. I try to get them to do a lot of talking.
BF: Can you talk a little about your role in assessment at Baruch?
VW: The College is committed to improving, and part of improving, involves assessing what we’re doing. We had to find out what we needed to improve, and we found out very early on in the assessment process at Zicklin that we needed to improve the teaching of oral and written communication skills. The summer seminar was an effort to get a more active teaching environment to take hold at the College, and I think it’s been really successful. The idea is that if students are more actively involved in the classroom, they will speak more and thus get more of a chance to practice their communication skills. Another goal has been to get more faculty members to teach and assign writing. When we did assessment, we had found that these areas were in need of improvement and needed to be addressed.
BF: I know there’s much more to your involvement on campus, some of it growing from your participation on the freshman text selection committee.
VW: Yes, that’s a good example of how one thing begets another. I was on that committee for many years, and while on it I met Mary McGlynn from the English department, and she invited me to be part of a grant group that was trying to develop links between two freshman learning community courses—in other words, how to make our different courses co-curricular. We spent a semester studying that and last semester we really worked together to link our two courses, Law 1101 and English 2100, in our freshman learning community. If I hadn’t met Mary on the freshman text selection committee, none of this would have happened. So one thing leads to another.
BF: Yes it certainly does.
VW: Actually, I was a volunteer on freshman text. Nobody even asked me to get involved. I just thought that sounded like a great idea—to sit around and discuss books for an hour with my colleagues and then choose a favorite?! So that’s how I got involved.
BF: And I know that involvement continued to expand this academic year.
VW: Yes. I was recently elected to co-chair the Zicklin Executive Committee. It’s a committee elected to serve two-year terms. We decided--because two of us were both interested in serving--that we would have co-chairs. Helaine Korn from Management is the other co-chair. It’s nice to reach out across the hallway. You never know what it could lead to—what kind of collaboration. In fact, I am working on an article now on the Organic Foods Production Act with Professor Sankar Sen, whom I met through my service on the Zicklin Executive Committee when he was chair, two years ago.
BF: I’m sure that you take all this experience—your sense of what goes on here—into the classroom. That can only be positive for your students.
VW: Yes, and I also find, though it may be a little cliché to say it, that you bring your research into the classroom too. It raises issues for you and then you talk to students about those issues. It stimulates you. You bring new ideas into the classroom, and you share them with students, which helps a lot to keep you fresh and alive.
BF: So, to sum up, what would you like people to take away from our conversation?
VW: That, yes, I’m committed to the institution—serving on so many of these broader strategic and planning committees, like Middle States, and to our overall commitment to improve and grow --but the best thing for me…the most important thing for me…is that I come here and walking into that classroom immediately energizes me. I really love those students and I love teaching. And when I walk in there, it’s the best part of the day. It goes so fast.
BF: One last question—to return to your research for a moment, you told me earlier that you’ve completed an article and have just submitted it to a number of law school journals.
VW: I just sent an article out on corporate responsibility for PCBs in schools—a big hot new issue. There’s a whole lot going on. The EPA hasn’t set safe levels for PCBs in air.
BF: It sounds like the next asbestos story.
VW: That’s exactly what I say in the opening paragraphs of my paper. The next asbestos and lead story.
BF: I can’t imagine it not getting a lot of attention.
VW: I hope so. Once someone is interested, others tend to get interested. I would love to get it into one of the law school environmental journals.
BF: I wish you the best of luck with it and thank you for a most wonderful conversation.
VW: Thanks to you, too.
Postscript: Since our conversation last fall, the EPA has set Public Health Levels for PCB concentrations in air and Professor Watnick’s article has been accepted for publication. It will appear this spring in Environs, the environmental law and policy journal of the Law School at the University of California at Davis.
Even in advance of its publication, the article has been receiving excellent reviews in both the scientific and legal communities for both its thoroughness and its importance as an exemplary scholarly contribution to the literature on toxics regulation.