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By Larry B. Dendy
ldendy@uga.edu
UGA should create an innovative College of the Environment that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries and draws together faculty and students to make UGA “the pre-eminent environmental university of the 21st century.”
That’s the recommendation of the Environmental Programs Enhancement Committee, formed this past spring by Karen Holbrook, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost, in response to President Michael F. Adams’s request for consideration of a new environmental college.
The 35-member group, composed mainly of faculty from throughout the university, recommends the new college in a report approved Feb. 15. Committee chair Ron Pulliam immediately sent the report to Holbrook with a request that she form an outside review team to assess the proposal and begin other steps that could lead to its implementation.
The recommendation is the culmination of some 10 months of work during which the committee gathered ideas and suggestions from faculty and students in five campus forums, through a Web site and in numerous meetings.
Committee members emphasized that the report provides only a general framework and acknowledged that necessary reviews at many levels--including University Council and the board of regents--mean the college can not become a reality soon.
The committee proposes a college that would focus on four broad environmental areas: ecology, including human ecology; earth and marine sciences; environmental health; and environmental design and urban planning.
The college would perform the traditional academic functions of teaching, research and public service, and would offer undergraduate and graduate degrees and fund research projects.
But the college would be decidedly untraditional in structure. The report uses terms such as “open,” “adaptive” and “flexible” to describe a new type of college built on the principle of bridging disciplines, promoting cross-campus cooperation and supporting environmental teaching, research and service in other university units.
Operating with a small number of internal departments, the college would have a dean and core faculty. But it would draw its strength from an Academy of Environmental Studies--an alliance of faculty from throughout the university who join together in small groups.
A few existing units, including the Institute of Ecology, the School of Environmental Design, and perhaps some other departments, would become part of the new college. Other departments would remain administratively in their current school, but would be “affiliated units” of the new college.
The report recommends creating three new centers in the college: one to promote environmental leadership; one for research on river-basin science and policy; and the Eugene P. Odum Institute for Advanced Ecological Studies, where scholars would study ways to incorporate ecological knowledge into environmental policy.
To house the new college, the committee recommends construction of a 240,000-square-foot building that would include 100 faculty offices and laboratories plus classrooms and space for meetings. Lack of adequate space is “one of the greatest impediments to the advancement of environmental programs” at UGA, and this facility should be built even if the College of the Environment is not formed, the committee says.
Creating the college will require “substantial new funding” for new faculty positions, including endowed chairs, and for the building and the proposed new programs.
The proposed Academy of Environmental Studies in the college would be home for the Faculty of Environmental Studies, open to anyone at the university who has a “professional interest” in the environment. It would breach disciplinary lines, encouraging interactions among environmental scientists and scholars in law, design, history, ethics and policy.
Existing departments in which a majority of faculty are involved in environmental work would be invited to become “affiliated units” of the new college. These units would operate under a “memorandum of understanding” that would spell out how teaching, research and service activities would be coordinated and managed.
Possible affiliated units include the departments of anthropology, environmental health science, crop and soil sciences, geology and marine sciences. Affiliation would be voluntary, and no department would be forced to become attached to the college.
The plan does call for the School of Environmental Design and the Institute of Ecology to be “wholly administered” through the college while retaining their identities as separate academic units.
The committee estimates the cost of creating the new college and implementing all the recommended programs and activities--not counting the proposed new building--will be about $8 million annually, or the equivalent of a $160 million endowment. To obtain funding, the committee recommends that the university add a new $3 million line to next year’s budget request and undertake an “aggressive” fund-raising effort to create a minimum $100 million endowment.
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