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By Larry B. Dendy
ldendy@uga.edu
The university plans to create a new College of Environment and Design that will assemble
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Karen Holbrook |
expertise and resources from throughout the campus to provide a new focus on instruction and research about the environment.
University planners believe that when it is fully operable, the college will be one of the nation’s leading centers for research, teaching and outreach on such environmental issues as species protection, preservation of natural resources, urban design and development, and global climate change.
“Our college will be unique in that it brings together studies of the built and unbuilt--natural--environment,” says Provost Karen Holbrook.
A concept plan for the college has been approved by several campus faculty groups and the University Council, UGA’s faculty governing body. President Michael F. Adams will send the proposal to the University System Board of Regents this summer for final approval.
UGA already has some of the best expertise in the country on environmental matters, but it is spread throughout the university in different departments and units. For example, UGA is internationally known for its Institute of Ecology and its Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases.
Scientists teach and conduct research and service programs in areas ranging from genetics and molecular biology to air and water pollution and the impact of humans on natural systems. The university also has respected programs in such nonscientific areas as environmental justice and ethics, environmental leadership and education, and environmental design and restoration.
The impetus for the new college grew out of President Michael F. Adams’s 1998 State of the University speech in which he suggested an environmental college as one of six initiatives. Adams says he is pleased with the outcome of his proposal. “My intention was to stimulate faculty to look at new and creative ways to better serve students’ educational needs and address critical issues facing society,” he says. “The College of Environment and Design will accomplish both those goals and will further strengthen the university’s stature in environmental research and education.”
The new college is designed to bridge departmental lines and bring faculty, facilities and programs into a central administrative home that fosters collaboration and resource sharing.
“This will be a reformatting of departments and centers to take advantage of the skills and expertise in those units,” says John Crowley, dean of the School of Environmental Design, who will also serve as the first dean of the new college. “It will give us a critical mass of talent we haven’t had before to work on environmental problems.”
Crowley describes the college as a “hybrid” that will build on the existing School of Environmental Design, which will join with the Institute of Ecology to form the core of the college. The environmental design school and the ecology institute will retain their budgets and begin merging their administrative structures during the transition year. Initially, they will function within the college in similar fashion to the way the School of Music operates in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
The heart of the college, says Crowley, will be the Academy of Environmental Design--the administrative home for the college’s faculty. All UGA faculty members who have a professional interest and needed skills in various environmental issues will be eligible to be in the academy regardless of their academic discipline. In addition to scientists in such areas as botany, biology, forestry, ecology, soil science and marine science, the academy could include professors in landscape architecture, business, sociology, law, journalism and other non-science areas and private industry.
Members of the academy will continue to work in their home departments. As faculty in the academy, they will also coordinate and offer courses, degree programs and certificate programs in environmental areas not covered in existing units. Arrangements for faculty members’ relationships with the college will be covered in memorandums of understanding with the faculty members’ home units. |
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