Some universities have created environmental studies programs that can be marketed to prospective students but that suffer from too little administrative support, limited faculty resources, and a lack of careful deliberation over the hard choices. In the short term, this institutional strategy can pay rich dividends: at minimal expense a university can lay claim to an environmental studies program and attract new students or accommodate the interest of existing ones, perhaps with the full intention of bringing additional resources to bear in later years. As the number of students in these skeleton programs grows, however, the flimsy administrative and curricular scaffolding beings to buckle, leading to an anythinggoes strategy that degenerates into curricular incoherence.