As a Duke undergraduate who took Bio 347L, Plants and People, in spring 2024, I witnessed firsthand the shock and devastation of my professors, Dr. Kathleen Pryer and Dr. Michael Windham, when the University announced it would be closing its 100-year-old herbarium.
The news came as an email to Dr. Pryer just before class started. Her normally cheerful demeanor was visibly transformed when she shared the news with the class: “Remember our excursion to the Duke herbarium in last week’s lab? Well, Duke now wants to be rid of it.” Witnessing our professors experience institutional betrayal in real time is a moment I’ll never forget.
On our herbarium class visit, we had hands-on experience with specimens collected over 200 years ago. We learned how plant knowledge connects to human uses and discovered the importance of voucher specimens for scientific studies. We saw how herbaria serve as libraries of plant diversity and play a crucial role in documenting disappearing ecosystems. A local high school student showed us how she was using historical herbarium data in a climate change study. She demonstrated that because of warming winters, the pink lady’s slipper orchid, Cypripedium acaule, was flowering at least two weeks earlier now in North Carolina than it was 150 years ago…