The campus community is invited to attend a town-hall meeting on the Environmental Initiative from 3 to 5 p.m. Monday, March 13, in the Cabernet Room of the Silo. The purpose of the gathering will be to discuss possible organizational structures, says Dennis Rolston, chair of the Faculty Steering Committee on the Environment and professor of land, air and water resources. In November, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Robert Grey established the committee to assist in revising the initiative and to evaluate and recommend a new organizational structure for environmental scholarship. Although environmental research at UC Davis is extensive and excellent in quality, the committee points out in a report a perception that "many areas of environmental research on campus lack both focus and visibility; the whole is less than the sum of the parts." The report notes the issue is partly a structural problem: "Academic staffing and planning for environmental scholarship is overly decentralized across semi-sovereign campus units, causing redundancies and inefficiencies in terms of [faculty] utilization for research and teaching." Environmental programs also compete with more traditional programs for resources in colleges and divisions. Inadequate funding for graduate students and a weak graduate-group system has harmed what the committee says is a "critical part of environmental research and education." The committee report says that in the past 20 years no new space has been dedicated to environmental researchers and their labs, concluding that "the infrastructure for environmental research is woefully inadequate." The committee is proposing a new organizational structure with sufficient resources "to make UC Davis the international leader in environmental scholarship, teaching and outreach." This would include: * Institutional support that makes UC Davis competitive in large, interdisciplinary grants; * The recruitment of 15-20 new faculty positions into "already very good" areas of scholarship in order to make them "excellent"; * The clustering of new hires who can share expertise and equipment; * Space dedicated to these new hires and large interdisciplinary efforts; and * The upgrading and increase of space for current core environmental programs.