November-10-2009
School of the Environment
Executive Committee Meeting Notes
November 10, 2009
Attending: John Rueter, Mark Systma, Tom Harvey, Andrew Fountain, Bill McFarland, Greg Fuhrer
1. We discussed the by-laws and it was agreed that I would send the chairs a pdf copy of the latest version and they would pass these on to the regular voting faculty of their departments for ratification. This is to happen as soon as possible.
Follow up: After the meeting, I decided it might be easier to compile the list of the voting faculty and send them the file directly and have them respond to me so that I can tally the vote.
2. We talked about the process of creating affiliated groups with the School. Faculty who are already PSU faculty can be affiliated with the School. This will give them the ability to serve on PhD commitees for the ESR PhD. Members of the CEE faculty who work on environmental issues were already included in the affiliated list. There are only a handful of other faculty from Biology, Physics, Chemistry and CUPA who need to be added.
Follow up: I will send out their names for approval as affiliated faculty. It was agreed that these should be extended to any PSU faculty who wish to play a role in the PhD advising or other projects within the School.
The other category of affiliation is for groups. We discussed several groups that we would like to extend an affiliation offer to. We approved extending this invitation to the Oregon Natural Heritage Information Center (http://oregonstate.edu/ornhic/). This group will be moving over 15 people to campus maybe as early as January 2010.
We also agreed to extend an affiliation to the new formed Berry Botanical Center. This group will include up to four people but they may rather be housed in ESM.
Then we discussed what are the criteria for forming affiliations. We decided that we need some initial criteria that are based on whether they are on-campus or have some official relationship with PSU and whether they have research, educational of funding reasons for the affiliation. The criteria should also have metrics for annual review to see if the affiliation should be continued. It was the general feeling that ther are many valuable people in the area that we can form relationship with through adjunct status, but to affiliate a group should reflect something more substantial about the organization. The criteria should also reflect a strong scientific basis. Groups who have a strong advocacy profile were felt to be inappropriate for School affiliation.
Follow up: We will extend the affiliation offer to ORNHIC and the Berry group.
I will contact several people who were interested in School affiliation and guide them to becoming adjuncts.
I will write up an appendix for the by-laws that provides a statement of our criteria.
3. We discussed co-location efforts. There are space and facilities requirements. USGS will need to renegogiate their arrangement with PSU soon and it will be important to plan for their continued location on campus. We also were exploring whether NRCS office in Portland wants to move to campus with a similar model to the USGS-PSU research collaborative.
Follow up: Andrew will contact NRCS to see if they are still interested.
John and Andrew will contact Mark Gregory and John McClean to discuss potential space and a new building or annex for geosciences equipment.
4. The status of the ESR-PhD program was reviewed. We discussed the consolidation of this program into the School of the Environment and what this will look like. We agreed that we need to move ahead to continue building a strong PhD interdisciplinary program and that this will be just one of the valuabel components of the School.
