Sorry to have been silent for a couple of weeks. There seems to be an endless number of award ceremonies and committee meetings to squeeze in before the end of the semester. This was good news in many ways, as it was due to a wealth of awards going to Nelson Institute affiliates and alumni. As you know Nelson Institute students were well represented at the Undergraduates Awards dinner (see last Director’s report). Eileen Hanneman collected her Martha Casey Award for Excellence. Russell Peterson was awarded a distinguished alumni award and Florence Chenoweth was awarded an honorary doctorate. The week ended with a very nice and well attended brunch reception for our graduates and their parents on Saturday, May 12th.
For those who didn’t make it to the retreat, I wanted to let you know that it was very productive. We had an opportunity for some in-depth discussion of the nature of interdisciplinary excellence and how that should affect decisions about future hires. We also looked both at teaching needs and promising research directions and found considerable convergence. We will be compiling results and sending them around within the next two weeks. Next steps will involve putting together several adhoc committees over the summer, one to work with the recommendations of the retreat in terms of drafting some position descriptions, one to work on alternate ideas for using the resources freed up by the retirements. We would also like to encourage any groups or individuals who see an opportunity for a leveraged hire or an innovative way to combine themes to submit proposals to our office. We will aim to report back on all these proposals and discussions at the first governance meeting in the fall.
We are sad to hear that Clark Miller will be leaving us this summer to go to ASU. Clark has added an energy and a vitality to Nelson Institute discussions and will be sorely missed. His departure, along with those from URPAL leaves us vulnerable in the area of Policy particularly.
We have recently been engaged with a group of students interested in increasing diversity in the Nelson Institute. A group of students, staff and faculty, led by Erica Howard, who have been meeting to discuss challenges to increasing diversity have prepared a white paper, which calls on the Institute to raise awareness and to take some steps to raise the profile of diversity issues. We had a productive meeting and discussed the need for the Institute to develop a stronger Environmental Justice and social justice agenda. The group hopes to launch a website soon and we will work together to recruit minority students and faculty.
With the last governance meeting behind us and summer break ahead, I wanted to make a suggestion about fall meetings. We have scheduled three meetings instead of two for the fall this year, and I am considering making one of these a more informal, discussion-focused meeting (a mini-retreat, if you will) which will allow us to explore ideas in a less formal way. Agenda items for discussion should be more open ended and strategy focused and could emerge before the meeting or at the meeting itself. I would be interested in your thoughts on this.
Lastly, there has been some concern reported to me about the relationship between the new IGERT and the discussions about program redesign (particularly in LAND). The IGERT grant was awarded for a particular experiment in interdisciplinary graduate education which was quite independent of the thinking going on about the program redesign. However, as the redesign proposals suggest a series of “neighborhoods” or thematic foci for groups of faculty/students, the new courses which will be designed for the IGERT can potentially represent one such thematic focus, sustainability and the global environment. Others currently under discussion are a thematic focus on conservation biology, one on culture, environment and history and one on agro-ecology. It is the hope that these separate foci will share learnings with each other.
That’s all for now. Look for the retreat report and enjoy the beginning of summer. I will be out of town from May 19-June 11. I will be presenting to a new group of environmental grant makers in Chicago, visiting Conservation International in Washington to discuss both possible funding for a Summer Institute for Conservation,and also an internship program, attending a research group meeting in Italy and a visiting our exchange program in Montpellier . I will be in touch again on my return.
Frances
