During the 2003-04 academic year, the faculty, staff, and students of the School of Earth Sciences joined together to discuss and debate our future, and to clarify our vision and mission for the next decade. The process culminated in a vision of the school as a collegial, collaborative, and inspiring home for discovery about the Earth, its resources, and environment, and for the transformation, integration, and application of knowledge for resource and environment problem solving.

Many of today’s Earth resource, environment, and hazards issues are complex and multifaceted, and will no longer yield to disciplinary perspectives alone. Integrative and transformational work at the crossroads of disciplines holds great promise, yet such approaches challenge the institutional structures of many universities and research centers. The School of Earth Sciences is uniquely placed to lead in these evolving areas. The school is home to a broad range of Earth sciences and engineering faculty, staff, and students, who focus on Earth’s solid and fluid components at distance scales from atomic to global and time scales from the age of Earth to the near-term past and immediate future. These school colleagues are already exchanging ideas and approaches across disciplinary boundaries. Likewise, our faculty draw few distinctions between basic and applied science, and instead seek fundamental discoveries while both exploring how the world works and addressing problems that affect humans and our life-support systems. Through the seamless integration of multiple disciplines, and with both fundamental and applied perspectives, we at the school seek to identify and address today’s greatest challenges in the Earth and environmental sciences.

Our renewed vision for the School of Earth Sciences was developed through a series of interviews, assessments, working-group activities, and retreats beginning in fall 2003. The strategic planning process was conducted in three phases and was directed by a school leadership committee made up of the dean, associate deans, and department chairs and program directors, with the assistance of AMC Strategies, a strategic planning consultant. Phase I fact finding involved consultant-led interviews of over half of our faculty and of student groups in all of our departments and programs, and an assessment of our external funding opportunities and characteristics of our sister institutions. In addition, five faculty/staff/student working groups met regularly from December until March to discuss areas related to academic programs, computational geosciences programs, core disciplines, graduate student resources, and environment programs. From these interviews, assessments, and discussions, we identified a number of strengths, weaknesses, and strategic priorities for the school. These priorities were distilled for presentation and discussion at a two-day retreat in March 2004 that included school faculty, department chairs and program directors, and the dean and associate deans. Mini-retreats with graduate students and lead administrative staff followed. Finally, the vision, mission, goals, and strategies were finalized and an implementation plan set in place. The hard work of implementation is now under way with the leadership of a reorganized and revitalized dean’s office staff, along with faculty and staff leaders.

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