November 2, 2006
A sea change in Forestry as seven faculty retire, nine new ones arrive
A 730-mile road trip in mid-September found long-tenured College of Forest Resources profs rubbing shoulders with faculty so new some hadn’t fully unpacked since moving to Seattle. The trip is one of the steps taken by the college as it navigates faculty changes unlike any it has experienced in more than 50 years.
With an average age of 56, the highest of any UW college or school, the College of Forest Resources finds itself in the midst of an 18-month period when seven professors, nearly a fifth of its faculty, will retire.
Gone will be 209 years of teaching and research experience, most of it completed right here at the UW.
As the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote last year, “Many professors hired during the great expansion of academe in the 1960s and ’70s are now reaching their golden years.” The UW College of Forest Resources isn’t the only one finding itself in this position. Here at UW, for example, the average age is 54 in the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences and 53 in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, according to data from Academic Human Resources.
In the same 18-month period, the College of Forest Resources will have added at least nine new faculty members, more new hires than during the previous 10 years put together. Two additional faculty searches are currently under way. Most of the new positions replace those left open by retirements. Some are new positions, either created at the UW, or resulting from agreements with Washington State University and the U.S. Geological Survey.
How best to handle the rush of new faces?
“When I started here, I was welcomed, given a key and shown where my office was. The rest was up to me,” said Gordon Bradley, chair of the faculty and a member of the college for 33 years. “We want to get the new people off to a good start so they find the right balance of teaching, research and service to stay on track for tenure.”
The journey Sept. 18-20 included a visit to the College of Forest Resources’ UW Botanic Gardens in Seattle, the Center for Sustainable Forestry at Pack Forest near Eatonville, lifts into the canopy of an old growth forest in a gondola at the Wind River Canopy Crane near the Columbia gorge and a review of research underway at the Olympic Natural Resources Center near Forks. Evening sessions included current faculty sharing success stories in teaching, research and service and professors Clare Ryan and Rick Gustafson leading a discussion about managing one’s academic career.
The field trip was the first in a sequence of activities to familiarize faculty with the resources of the UW, Gordon said. The college also is planning two-hour workshops on topics such as funding sources, grant writing, teaching methods, classroom evaluation and mentoring approaches.
The college needed a special way to welcome the new faculty, according to Cecilia Paul, director of communications for the college. She was among the 24 existing staff and faculty members who joined the field trip and, while helping orient the new faculty, also had the chance to learn more about the skills and interests of the researchers joining the college.
The new faculty bring experiences ranging from working for the USDA Forest Service and the Environmental Protection Agency to being fluent in German, Russian and Polish. The holder of a position newly created by WSU here at the UW’s College of Forest Resources has 25 years of experience with fungi and plant pathology including having served as director and assistant dean at the WSU’s Puyallup Station.
The college didn’t want to automatically replace retiring faculty or vacancies with the same skills, according to Bruce Bare, dean of the college where the faculty, staff and students have been actively engaged in strategic planning activities since 1995. As part of that work, a faculty portfolio subcommittee in 2002 tried to discern areas needing focus in the future, for instance, new expertise in plant biotechnology, natural-products chemistry and remote sensing.
It’s one way to retain the college’s ranking as one of the top five forest school programs in North America and the No. 1 in Western United States in terms of research productivity, Bare says.
Bare joined the UW in 1969 and he was a faculty member when the college grew in the 1970s because of increases in forestry funding. As dean, he watched the college reach the point in 2005 where it had no tenure-track faculty below the rank of associate professor and growing numbers of faculty who’d been with the college for 30 years or more.
“We ended up practicing even-age management with the faculty,” he says, referring to a term usually applied to stands of trees.
“Recruitment of a new cohort of faculty with a vastly different set of disciplinary skills will enable the college to achieve its vision of world-class leadership in natural resources and environmental sustainability.
