Serving Georgia: UGA’s Response To Georgia's Key Challenges

Georgia's challenges demand a new level of imagination and commitment from its flagship, land-grant, research university. The University must, in the service of Georgia, reach for and attain new heights of teaching quality, scholarship, research and service. It must, if Georgia is to fulfill its potential and its citizens to fulfill theirs, become one of the premier research universities, not only in America, but in the world.

It is anticipated that this must happen in two ways: First, we must achieve and maintain excellence in teaching, research and service in each of the disciplines in which the University offers programs. We must not allow the siren songs of new programs to distract the institution from its first priority of allocating its resources to ensure that its teaching of both undergraduates and graduate students, in each of the programs of study it offers, is of the highest possible quality.

Second, the University must indeed adjust its curriculum and its structures of disciplinary organization to meet the new challenges and opportunities of the rapidly changing world. It is not obligated, of course, to offer all programs of higher education study; it is, however, obligated to offer those most needed by the citizens of Georgia for the foreseeable future, and to adjust its resources to support those programs.

Achieving and being recognized as a land-grant research university of the highest quality are two different things, but both will require at least the following:

• A library of the highest quality. UGA's library is already superb, and moving in all the right directions to continue to provide information support at the highest level. We must provide the support it needs to continue its leadership.
• National leadership in the disciplines comprising Arts and Sciences. The life sciences at UGA are arguably our strongest research area (as well as our largest), with Ecology, Chemistry and Mathematics also of very high quality. Political Science (including Public Administration), English, History, Art and Music are all large departments with potential for achieving national leadership, given sufficient resources and resource management.
• Agriculture remains the single largest segment of Georgia's economy. Clearly, agriculture is important to the future of our state and the various and many programs at the University of Georgia which support and enlarge the agriculture of Georgia will continue to be of paramount priority.
• National-caliber schools of law and business. These fields are indispensable to the mission of the land-grant university in the contemporary world - they are where education makes business happen. Both UGA's Law School and Terry College of Business, have the potential, if properly supported by their alumni and other external constituencies, to rank among the best in the nation at the end of a decade of focused hiring, management, resource development and ambitious labor by faculty and staff.
• Outstanding regional leadership, and competitive national and international presence by the other colleges and schools of the University: Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Education, Environmental Design, Family and Consumer Sciences, Warnell School of Forest Resources, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, Pharmacy, Social Work, and Veterinary Medicine.
• New programs that respond to emerging interests of students, strengths of the current faculty and opportunities for new resource development.
• An expanded volume of research, scholarship and creative endeavors, supported by a substantial increase in badly needed research space across the campus.
• Superior teaching in all of its myriad forms, including residential and tutorial, fully aided by the vast array of information technology now increasing the range of teaching and learning opportunities almost daily.
• A major commitment to achieve the highest level of information technology support for all areas of the institution. This will be an area of major new expense for the imaginable future, but without a world-class information technology environment UGA cannot hope to be a world-class university.

In each of its programs, in each area of teaching, research and service, and in every dimension of its thinking, the University has as its first and foremost goal the high calling of "Serving Georgia." Teaching its students with care and distinction, pursuing new discoveries and artistic creations that will enrich and improve the lives of our citizens and continually looking for ways in which the expertise of faculty and the other manifold assets of the institution can be utilized to benefit the state is the fundamental mission of the University of Georgia.

Updated 12/09/2000