The environment, closely followed by genomics, will be the top priority for the campus's oldest college during the next five years. The new academic plan for the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences parallels campuswide initiatives on the environment and genomics, and calls for a new emphasis on boosting graduate-student education. The plan was drafted last year by a faculty committee that identified five program areas that should be the backbone for future growth. Hoping to better focus limited resources, Dean Neal Van Alfen and his leadership team-most of whom were new to their posts last fall-selected the environment and agricultural genomics for initial emphasis. "We realized we need to recognize the strengths, not only of our college, but of the whole campus," said Van Alfen. Furthermore, the two priority areas are critical to the mission of the Agricultural Experiment Station, he added. "Even most growers would place environmental issues as the top priority for agriculture," said Van Alfen. He noted that academic planning is a particularly challenging process for his college, which has actively interested "stakeholders" from the agricultural industry as well as from state and federal agencies. "We constantly have people looking over our shoulders as we make decisions," he said, smiling. Water seen as pivotal to state future Water and watersheds will be the college's primary emphasis in the environmental arena. "We look at the whole environmental area as one of our core strengths but, in California, water is a key issue," said Jim MacDonald, executive associate dean for the college. "So many things point to water as being pivotal to the future of California." He noted that the college's expertise in water-related research meshes well with campus strengths, and some projects, like Lake Tahoe, have brought considerable attention to the campus. The college's second priority is "genomics," a new term for the study of the structure and function of large groups of genes of plants, animals and microbes. The college is currently interviewing for several faculty positions in the area of plant genomics, which also is a campus strength. While emphasizing the environment and genomics, the college also plans to slow undergraduate enrollment growth and boost graduate student enrollment. "During the past five years, the campus has grown by 1,900 undergraduate students and nearly half of that growth-886 students-was absorbed by this college," said Van Alfen. "Our plan is to not encourage that same rate of growth now, because the college is about the size it should be in terms of undergraduate enrollment." The college, which currently has five undergraduate students for every graduate student, plans to bring that down to a three-to-one ratio by actively promoting increases in graduate enrollment. During the next few years, departments and majors will be eyed carefully for their success at drawing graduate students. "We're basically making a clear statement that all of our programs should be of the highest quality and able to attract the best graduate students," Van Alfen said. "That will be a litmus test for our programs." Rebuilding the faculty Meanwhile, the college will be rebuilding its faculty. Even as the number of students has increased by 26 percent in the college, the number of faculty has decreased in two of the college's three divisions, Van Alfen noted. There are 8.9 percent fewer instruction and research faculty in the agricultural sciences division and 12.7 percent fewer in the human sciences division than in 1991, he said. Only the environmental sciences division has grown in faculty numbers-by 9.8 percent-during the past decade. And even in that division, some programs such as hydrology in the land, air and water resources department and the environmental toxicology department suffered disproportionately from early faculty retirements during the lean fiscal years of the early 1990s. The dean's office projects that nearly 80 of its 400 faculty members will retire within the next five to 10 years and new hires will be made in accordance with the identified academic priorities. "While building in our designated priority areas, we also have to maintain our strengths in our existing core areas," Van Alfen said. Need to replace old buildings There will be a heavy emphasis on upgrading and expanding college facilities, ranging from laboratories to greenhouses to animal facilities. "Being the oldest college, we occupy the campus's oldest buildings, many of which are now inadequate for research," Van Alfen said. "We'll be looking everywhere we can to free up resources to improve our facilities." He noted that inadequate facilities are an obstacle to recruiting high-caliber faculty members and students. "We would place a priority on putting in new facilities where we could cluster our environmental science faculty and genomics faculty," he said. The college is now in the process of developing a facilities plan that will prioritize facilities needs. Van Alfen projected that at least three large modern research buildings are currently needed, in addition to the plant and environmental sciences building, which is currently under construction.