The Nelson Institute Blog

Reid Bryson, founding director of the Nelson Institute, gave a very interesting presentation at the Conference on Interdisciplinarity held this Thursday and Friday. He described the origins of the Nelson Institute and its evolving role in the university. His talk is posted to the blog.

One of the Nelson Institute’s veteran staff members, Melanie Woodworth, is retiring this week. Melanie has provided a wide range of administrative support for the Center for Climatic Research since 1974, and she has done a superb job. (Another able member of our staff, Marcia Verhage, will assume her responsibilities.) Thank you, Melanie. We wish you the very best!

We heard the good news that the divisional committee has approved Clark Miller’s tenure. Clark serves on our governance faculty as well as the Academic Planning Council, played a key role in the recent successful IGERT proposal, and has played an increasingly large role in helping think through a new template for our Ph.D. program. We are delighted at this news. Congratulations, Clark!

Several other members of the Nelson Institute community deserve congratulations for recent distinctions:

Faculty Honors

Emeritus Professor John Kutzbach, associate director (and former director) of the Nelson Institute’s Center for Climatic Research, has been selected to receive the American Geophysical Union’s Roger Revelle Medal for “outstanding contributions in atmospheric sciences, atmosphere-ocean coupling, atmosphere-land coupling, biogeochemical cycles, climate, or related aspects of the Earth system.” The award will be given at the AGU’s annual meeting in San Francisco next December. John uses computer models of earth’s climate to investigate the causes of climate change in the geologic past as well as the role of humans in causing climate change. His studies also have helped clarify the interactions and feedback links between atmosphere, ocean, land, and vegetation.

Student Awards

• Julie Curti, a double-major undergraduate earning a certificate in environmental studies, has received a prestigious Harry S. Truman Scholarship to pursue graduate work related to public service. The scholarship provides a total of $30,000 plus significant networking and career support.
• Six land resources graduate students have been awarded Doris Duke Conservation Fellowships for 2006-07. Our next group of Duke Fellows will be Peter Boger, Leif Brottem, Ariana Hauck, Erin Heidtke LaFaive, Andrew Stuhl, and Katy Warner. Each will receive an assistantship for the academic year, a generous stipend for a summer internship at a nonprofit conservation organization or government agency, and funds to participate in an annual fall fellowship retreat.
• Another undergraduate in our Environmental Studies Certificate Program, Kaitlyn Flick, has been awarded a Holstrom Environmental Scholarship to conduct a sociological case study of Native Americans, corporations, and the environment in Crandon, Wisconsin. The scholarship provides $4,000 to Kaitlyn and $1,000 to her faculty adviser, Samar Alatout, to help defray the costs of her research.
• Finally, two of our land resources graduate students, Dawn Burgardt and Maggie Grabow, received Zieve Awards this semester. The awards, named for land resources alumna Charlotte Zieve, whose generous support makes them possible, cover their tuition for the spring term.

The Redesign Committee (Jon Foley, Clark Miller, Pete Nowak), met last week to discuss progress on the redesign of coursework and structure within the Land Resources degree.

In the upcoming weeks, the committee will prepare a presentation of their plans to the Land Resources faculty.

Learn more about the committee’s plans by visiting the Meeting Minutes.

We encourage you to register for and attend the seventh annual Showcase conference, being held Monday April 3rd, from 7:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. in the UW-Madison Memorial Union. The conference is an opportunity for the UW-Madison community to share their best ideas with each other, including a Leadership Panel presentation by Nelson Institute Director Frances Westley, and a poster presentation by our own Eileen Hanneman, Hope Simon, and Mary Strernitzky. See you there!

I wanted to be sure that all of you knew about the Interdisciplinarity Conference on this Thursday afternoon (March 30) and all day Friday.
The break out session where our Criteria Committee work will be discussed is Friday morning at 9:00 a.m. (Session E: Guidelines for Promotion and Tenure of Interdisciplinary Faculty). Frances is giving the keynote talk Thursday evening, Interdisciplinary Excellence: A Competency Based Approach. If you are interested in attending, registration is still open - else feel free to stop by if there is a session of interest.

Sincerely,

Nancy E. Mathews, Associate Professor
Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies

The Competency Committee, comprised of Nancy Langston and Sharon Dunwoody, met last week to address how practical and conceptual skills should be folded into the Land Resources program.

In the upcoming weeks, the committee will research graduate programs in environmental studies, as well as environmental leadership workshops across the country. The committee hopes to assess both the types competency skills currently taught and the methods used to teach them.

The committee will meet again on April 11th, just before they reconvene with the Redesign Committee.

For details of last week’s meeting, please visit the Meeting Minutes.

Tracey Holloway

Zhengyu Liu

Tom Eggert

Pat Eagan

Mark Finster

Jon Foley (co-Chair)

Dan Anderson (co-chair)

Anne Terlaak

Peter Bosscher

Anne Miner

Vicki Bier

John Surdyk

Michael Hernke

Lewis Gilbert

Lewis Gilbert, Chair

Zheng-Yu Liu

Tom Lillesand

Matt Turner

Jon Foley

Pete Nowak

Cal DeWitt

Ken Potter

Jonathan Chipman

Holly Gibbs

Nancy Mathews (chair)

Tracey Holloway

Steve Ventura

Cal DeWitt

Pat Eagan

Pete Nowak

Steve Vavrus

Lewis Gilbert

What is happening around the undergraduate major? This has come up several times in the last few weeks and so I thought I would bring you up to date. If you will remember, we did a survey last year about who was interested in teaching in a major, in order to make an estimate of resources available and required. The faculty was pretty evenly divided at that point, and it was decided that we needed either to petition the university to put extra resources to the support of a campus wide undergraduate major in environmental studies or to go back to the drawing board and explore the possibility, advocated by Bill Cronon, of a “resource neutral” undergraduate major. The committee that had been working on the undergraduate major tasked our office to continue negotiations with the other relevant colleges and schools and with the administration. To that end we prepared, in early fall, a proposal for a funding from the central strategic initiative pool to finance the undergraduate major proposal which had been put together by the committee led by Steve Ventura. The proposal was welcomed by the interim provost, Gina Sappiro, but I was told that in fact there were no strategic funds available at that time. In January, however, it was announced that there would be a modest pool of funds put aside by the administration for proposals which addressed the strategic priorities of the university. As a recent task force on short term goals identified improving relationships with the state, fostering interdisciplinarity and encouraging entrepreneurial education initiatives as top priorities, I feel that the proposal stands a chance, and we will resubmit it. However, as leadership is changing yet again, the new Provost may bring in a new set of priorities. I will persist in raising this issue.

Meanwhile, Lewis Gilbert has been consulting with his Deans and associate Deans in L&S, CALS, and Engineering and has met with cautious support, in principle, for a campus wide undergraduate major. However, no one is convinced that a “cost-neutral major” is possible. Jocelyn Milner , Director of Academic Planning and Analysis, has indicated that our certificate is widely perceived as one of the most successful on campus and that a potentially strong strategy, in a time when central resources are slim or absent, might be to strengthen and enhance that certificate instead. We’d be interested in people’s thoughts about that as a strategy.

And speaking of hard financial times, the tuition remission surcharges to the individual schools and colleges has been announced. The Nelson Institute will be billed an additional $200,000.00 for tuition remission in 2007 and extraordinary “hit” which will largely be absorbed by the research centers, but will ultimately affect us all. We need to do some thinking about how many graduate students we can support in future, as well as for how long we can guarantee tuition remission. This isn’t good news but I can’t overemphasize how important our research centers are to the Nelson Institute and how critical it is to maintain support for our students. We will need to find creative solutions.

Creative thinking continues to go on about new ways to think about our graduate programs, as well as how to build a competency approach. Pete Nowak is heading a committee to explore these issues and Nancy Langston and Sharon Dunwoody have been examining the parameters and possibilities of a competency approach. Nancy Mathews is chairing a committee to establish criteria for evaluating interdisciplinary teaching, research and outreach. And Lew Posekany continues to chair a very dynamic outreach committee. Through the work of this committee I have recently had opportunities to talk to Jim Haney, President of Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, and Steve Bablitch, Secretary of the DOA. Both have expressed interest in working more closely with scientists in the Institute. We are hoping to begin a newsletter as a resource for both the corporate and policy community. Steve Pomplun is stepping into a new role in the Institute in heading up the effort to create such targeted communications. Lastly, Jon Foley and Dan Anderson are chairing a Business & Environment Committee focused on building a partnership between the Business School and the Nelson Institute. For those of you interested in knowing more about the membership and ongoing work of these committees, please visit the relevant section of the blog. The work of these committees will shape our discussions at the Spring Retreat, scheduled for May 11th, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Arboretum.

And a brief update on geospatial teaching challenge. In my last meeting with outgoing interim Provost Gina Sappiro, she told me that the Chancellor would soon respond formally as to whether or not any new resources are available centrally for supporting ongoing teaching in remote sensing and geospatial analysis. In the meantime, however, in her role as Vice Chancellor of Teaching and Learning, she still plans to appoint a special committee to explore new ideas about meeting the learning needs of this campus’ students, within existing resource limitations. She reiterated that she sees this as a campus wide, and perhaps system-wide concern.

Lastly, we hosted the third lecture of the Gaylord Nelson Distinguished Lecture Series last Tuesday. Kai Erikson, Kenan Professor of Sociology from Yale University, spoke to a large audience about “Disaster, Environment, and Social Order: Reflections on Katrina.” Our last lecture of this academic year will be Lester Brown, speaking about Environment and Population on April 20th, 2006. The series has been an unqualified success, well attended by both the university and broader Madison communities and covering a wide range of issues of concern to Gaylord Nelson during his lifetime.

Have a great week everyone.

Frances

A coyote was recently sighted and eventually captured in Central Park. An editorial in the New York Times takes a quick look at how that event illuminates our relationship with the wild.