Proposal #91
Proposal Title: Coordinating Earth and Environmental Education and Scholarship at SF State
Anticipated Savings/Revenue:
Units affected:
Impacted Degrees/Courses:
Brief Description of Proposal:
Preamble
In response to the call for proposals by the University Planning Advisory Council (UPAC) to address the urgent challenges facing SF State, the faculty of the Department of Geosciences has held extensive discussions about how we as a department, and other interested academic units and individual faculty members across the campus with common goals, can best serve the needs of our students, and help advance the goals of the University, in particular those related to equity and social justice and the preservation of a sustainable future for our planet. Our department has long been an interdisciplinary one, where faculty trained in the three main areas of the geosciences—geology, meteorology and oceanography—have worked closely to create innovative curricula that have served our students well. We have had collegial relations with two other units that have overlapping interests with us: the Department of Geography and Human Environmental Studies, and the Environmental Studies Program, both units within the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences.
The proposal below represents the views of the faculty of the Department of Geosciences; it emanates from extensive and thoughtful discussion that has taken into account trends we see taking place at other academic institutions across the country. We have had preliminary discussions about our ideas with the chairs/directors of both Geography and Environmental Studies, and we welcome and look forward to the perspectives they will bring to the issues we raise in this proposal. We are submitting this document to the UPAC in the hope that it will be deemed worthy of further consideration by the wider campus community. We look forward to continued discussions abot the issues raised.
I. Global context
The 2010 Haiti earthquake reminds us of the potential impact of earth dynamics and the vulnerability of our societies to such catastrophic events. Although countless lives were lost, the death toll and destruction could have been much worse had the earthquake happened during the rainy season when hillsides denuded of vegetation would have caused severe mudslides, such as were caused by three hurricanes (Fay, Gustav and Hana) that hit that country in quick succession in 2008. Haiti’s problems are rooted in geology, climate, and geography, but also stem from centuries of oppression and social injustice. The environmental damage in Haiti will take decades to remedy, even under the best of circumstances.
Catastrophic earth and environmental problems of a scope similar to Haiti’s are felt worldwide; witness the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. Locally in the Bay Area, these are sober reminders of our own vulnerability as residents of the San Andreas Fault zone. Californians face unprecedented challenges from a dynamic Earth and in adapting our vulnerable society to a multitude of challenges both catastrophic and incremental, including population growth, climate change and variability, sustainability of a safe and adequate supply of water, food and energy. Coping with these issues requires societal actions such as land use planning, environmental regulation, changing priorities for resource allocation (among communities, among species), providing equitable access to food and health care, etc.
These challenges provide a unique opportunity for earth and environmental educators. San Francisco State University and its faculty take justifiable pride in advancing equity and social justice. Our faculty is dedicated to understanding our planet and the processes that shape its environment, both physical and cultural. Many of our students are committed to “saving our planet”, are aware of some of the challenges that society will face adapting to global change, and thus actively seek educational experiences that will better prepare them to make a difference. As earth and environmental educators, we must recognize the paradigm-shifting nature of global change and be forward thinking in the curricular and educational environment that we provide to ensure our students’ success in an evolving workforce.
II. Specific Proposal
A structure for coordinated environmental education and scholarship at SFSU
We hope that interested groups across campus will join us in efforts to coordinate and integrate teaching, research and service focused on the Environment. Currently, three units have the environment at the core of their mission: the Department of Geosciences (GSCI), the Department of Geography and Human Environmental Studies (GEOG), and the Environmental Studies Program (ENVS). The scope of this new organizational structure would need to be subject to further discussions, but we envision a range of possible configurations: one end member would be a “School for Earth and the Environment” that could bring all three units (and potentially other kindred faculty) together under a common roof; another end member could be simply an “Environmental Coordination Council” with representatives from all three units and from other campus units with environmental aspects of their missions. We anticipate that other stakeholders will bring ideas to the table that we have not yet thought of, but that will work for the benefit of all involved, most particularly the students of San Francisco State University.
Regardless of the organizational structure that might emerge from this process, our over-arching goal is to catalyze environmental scholarship at SF State by taking advantage of the huge potential for interdisciplinary collaboration, by raising the profile of environmental teaching and scholarship across campus and beyond, and by increasing the coherence and effectiveness of environmental programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
III. Relation to UPAC Proposal Evaluation Criteria
1. Cost savings or revenue enhancement proposed
Depending on the scope of any new organizational structure, the following types of cost savings and revenue enhancements can be anticipated:
- Enhanced ability to raise external funds from private donors and foundations because of higher public profile for environmental programs at SFSU.
- Enhanced ability to secure external research funding because of more effective interdisciplinary collaboration and ability to address large, cross-cutting questions in areas such as global change, climate change adaptation, and sustainability.
- Cost savings resulting from increased student retention and reduced time to graduation because of more effective program coordination.
- Cost savings resulting from improved sharing of laboratory and other resources.
- Cost savings resulting from reduced overlap in degree programs.
- Opportunities for revenue generation through coordinated service and consulting to local and state governmental agencies, businesses and non-governmental organizations.
- Enhanced ability to provide students with externally-funded internships and research support.
2. Prospects for reducing duplication and maximizing efficiencies
- Potential coordination and/or consolidation of degree programs. The three units (GSCI, GEOG, ENVS) currently offer a total of 4 BS, 5 BA, 2 MA and 2 MS degree programs. Improved coordination and potentially the consolidation of some programs could reduce time to graduation, and reduce imbalances in student-to-faculty ratios across programs.
- Sharing and coordinated expansion of laboratory, computing, and other resources.
3. Preservation and furtherance of SF State’s mission and strategic goals, including the pursuit of social justice and equity (goals listed below in Appendix).
Environmental scholarship, encompassing all aspects of education, research and community service, is central to the mission and strategic goals of the university. The significant improvement, coordination and potential expansion in environmental programs at SF State envisioned in this proposal would:
- promote equity and social justice through teaching, research, service and advocacy on many important environmental issues including: environmental justice, sustainable management of water and other natural resources, climate change mitigation and adaptation, ecosystem restoration, etc. [GOAL 1]
- improve writing across the environmental curricula through increased program coordination and assessment. [GOAL 2]
- improve the quality of graduate education in the area of the environment, through increased external funding, attracting and retaining excellent faculty and students, and widening the recognition of the high value of a graduate degree from SF State. [GOAL 3]
- create expanded opportunities for international experiences and perspectives because of the global nature of the critical environmental challenges facing humanity today. [GOAL 4]
- provide greater support for full participation in university life through enhanced external funding and more efficient use of existing resources. [GOAL 5]
- improve the visibility and reputation of environmental education, scholarship and service at SF State in the wider community. [GOAL 6]
- increase understanding of the purpose and value of environmental programs at SF State by creating a stronger sense of community and shared goals within a more unified structure. [GOAL 7]
4. Preservation and furtherance of SF State’s role as a public urban university that serves the needs of the community.
SF State’s role in serving the needs of the community regarding environmental issues and problems, would be significantly enhanced by:
- Higher visibility for environmental programs at SF State, leading to increased linkages and partnerships with community organizations, public agencies and enterprises.
- Greater interdisciplinary collaboration among faculty and students, facilitating creation of multidisciplinary teams to address specific environmental problems.
5. Extent to which proposals maintain or increase the quality of student experience.
Creation of an integrated unit focused broadly on the environment could increase the quality of student experience in myriad ways, including:
- Better integration of intellectual cultures rooted in social and physical sciences.
- Enhanced skills development in both environmental problem solving and advocacy.
- Improved opportunities for funded research and community service.
- More coherent curricula and choices in degree programs.
- More efficient paths to graduation.
6. Extent to which proposals maintain or increase the quality of faculty and staff.
Depending on the scope of the new organizational structure, the quality of faculty and staff, would be increased by:
- Enhanced opportunities for intellectual growth through interdisciplinary collaboration in scholarship and teaching.
- Improved ability to secure external funding.
- Coordination of faculty hiring plans, leading to improved faculty diversity and synergy in development of collaborative research groups particularly among probationary faculty.
- Increased visibility and stature for environmental programs at SF State, which will help to attract and retain excellent faculty and staff
IV. What the Geosciences Department can bring to the table
The points listed below illustrate some of the contributions that the Department of Geosciences faculty can make to improving environmental education on campus. These contributions should be complementary to those that can be made by other existing units and faculty working in the areas of cultural geography, and the social and biological sciences:
- The Geosciences Department includes three disciplines related to environmental science (geology, meteorology, oceanography) and has faculty and students who study environmental change and sustainability, including global climate change.
- The Geosciences Department has strong connections with the Geography and Human Environmental Studies Department. Several Geography faculty regularly serve on Geosciences MS thesis committees and teach or co-teach Geosciences courses. Many Geosciences graduate students take advantage of the resources and expertise of the Institute for Geographical Information Science. Our departments have several cross-listed courses and we are discussing more ways to streamline our curricular offerings.
- The Geosciences Department has strong connections to the Environmental Studies Program. One of our faculty was a primary member of the committee that created the ES program in the mid-90s. She was largely responsible for creating the Earth Systems Science concentration and continues to be the primary advisor for this degree option, which includes many geoscience courses. Three faculty are members of the ES group of Associated Faculty, and one of them teaches the Environmental Geology course that is in the core for all ES majors. Many of our faculty and students made important contributions to planning and implementing the successful Focus the Nation on Climate Change event in early 2008.
- Geosciences has long had close links with the University’s Romberg Tiburon Center (RTC), the only environmental research facility located on the shores of San Francisco Bay. Our faculty and students have contributed to research conducted at this facility. The RTC can be a location where more future environmental research and hands-on training for SF State’s students can take place. There’s also room for better use of the Sierra Nevada Field Campus, where Biology and Geography faculty teach summer classes.
- Geosciences faculty and students have worked with other environmental faculty in departments in the College of Science and Engineering, including environmental chemists, environmental engineers, ecologists, and science educators, and in departments in other colleges, such as Recreation, Parks and Tourism.
- Better coordination of all these units with an environmental focus would catalyze on-campus environmental scholarship, in all of its manifestations—teaching, research, service—to produce many benefits for students and faculty
- The Geosciences Department has many strengths that will be valuable to any new organizational structure, these include:
- Commitment to teaching excellence, with a focus on developing innovative pedagogies and continuing professional development, and a history of success in obtaining funding for teaching/learning innovations.
- Successful hiring and retention of dynamic junior faculty researchers (5 in last 7 years), which has resulted in strong and accelerating growth in external research funding and a large increase in annual rate of peer-review publications.
- An ever-increasing focus of faculty/student research on issues related to the environment, including restoring rivers for fish habitat, understanding effects of climate change on water quality and quantity, helping local governmental agencies to manage groundwater resources, unraveling the history of past climate changes to improve our response to present and future changes, quantifying hazard probabilities due to earthquakes and landslides, quantifying ocean waves processes to help local agencies cope with coastal erosion, providing daily regional weather data to the public.
- A graduate program enjoying steady increases in the quantity and quality of student research and post-graduate professional outcomes.
- Recent growth in private donations, including the establishment of an endowment to support student research grants program and the Dawdy Library for Hydrologic Sciences.
- Strong collaborative ties with external institutions, including the California Academy of Sciences, the US Geological Survey, the National Weather Service, and research laboratories at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University and U.C. Santa Cruz.
- A diverse community of undergraduate majors, and a successful NSF-funded program to enhance diversity in the Earth Sciences by working with local high school students and teachers (SF-ROCKS).
- Nationally, we see a trend toward integration across the Earth and Environmental Sciences, in which departments in various disciplines have created coordinated units to catalyze a more effective focus on the environment. This has occurred at both public institutions (for example the University of Illinois School of the Earth, Environment and Society, and the U.C. Berkeley Institute of the Environment), and at private institutions (Duke University Nicholas School for the Environment and Earth Sciences and Stanford University Woods Institute for the Environment).
- Nationally, there has also been a trend toward increasingly integrated and interdisciplinary governmental agencies and professional societies in the geosciences. For example, the U.S. Geological Survey now includes the Biological Discipline and an increased focus on environmental projects and global change, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has reorganized and created a National Climate Service to come up with strategies for adapting to global climate change. The Geological Society of America has added divisions in “Geology and Health”, “Geology and Society”, and “Geobiology & Geomicrobiology”, and other professional societies have likewise expanded their mission.
Appendix—SFSU Strategic Plan (http://www.sfsu.edu/strategicplan/strategic.html)
Goal 1: San Francisco State University demonstrates commitment to its core values of equity and social justice through the diversity of its students and employees, the content and delivery of its academic programs and support systems, and the opportunities for both campus and external constituencies to engage in meaningful discourse and activity.
Goal II: San Francisco State University makes writing central to education and ensures that its graduates write proficiently.
Goal III: San Francisco State University offers high-quality post-baccalaureate education widely recognized for its intellectual value and contribution to society.
Goal IV: San Francisco State University provides its students, faculty, and staff
with international experiences, perspectives, and competencies.
Goal V: San Francisco State University provides its students, faculty, and staff with the resources that enable them to participate fully in university life.
Goal VI: San Francisco State University is a recognized leader in providing intellectual, social, and cultural resources to the expanded community.
Goal VII: San Francisco State University's internal and external constituencies understand its purpose and value and find these a source of connection and pride.
Note: Proposals are posted as submitted, without
editing other than to remove the submitter's contact information.
