Looking back, looking ahead

Purdue Ag in transition

Where is Purdue Agriculture headed? One dean has moved out of his office. His replacement may not move in until December. Perhaps there is no time like the present to measure our progress — how far we have come and where we are going.

The wheels are in motion to find a permanent replacement for Vic Lechtenberg, PhD ’71, who became vice provost for engagement on July 1.

A search committee headed by Vice Provost Charles O. Rutledge will soon turn the results of a national search over to Provost Sally Mason, who hopes to have a new dean in place by the end of the year.

Purdue Agriculture may be at a crossroads. But the interim dean, Randy Woodson, is confident Purdue Agriculture is well positioned for the future.

“What Vic has done, very effectively, is to provide Purdue Agriculture with a clear road map to the future,” Woodson says. “We’ve developed an outstanding strategic plan.

We are going to continue to do everything we can to enhance the profitability and the productivity of Indiana agriculture.”

Who is better suited to assess the direction of Purdue Agriculture than Lechtenberg, the man who guided it for the past decade and whose Purdue career stretches through five decades, and Woodson, the interim dean who worked closely with him?

As dean, Lechtenberg established policy, hired department heads and was the visible face of Purdue Agriculture for all of Indiana.

Beyond that, he carried the flag for Indiana agriculture and had the ear of national agriculture policymakers in Washington.

“Those who know Vic know he has a strong voice for agriculture in Indiana,” says Woodson, “a voice we have all benefited from greatly over the years.”

What is Purdue Agriculture? Reduced to its least common denominators, it is people — students, faculty and staff. And it is facilities — bricks and mortar.

Teachers can teach, literally, in the middle of the woods. In fact, in the School of Agriculture, they often do just that. But without good teachers, well, school is out.

"Without good faculty, you don’t produce good students. And if you don’t have good students, you have a second-class university. The two absolutely essential pieces to a university are the faculty and the students,” Lechtenberg says.

“I think Purdue Agriculture is well positioned for the future. I think we’ve hired some outstanding young faculty in recent years.”

They are hires that not only reflect the diversity of the student body at Purdue, but also the changing diversity of Indiana.

In the past two years, Purdue Agriculture has hired 38 faculty members. Nineteen of those hires have either been ethnic minorities or women.

“We always hire the best person for the job,” says Lechtenberg, “but we are working hard to make sure we always have a diverse pool of candidates for each faculty opening.”

As proof, look no further than the Book of Great Teachers, an honor roll of academic excellence initiated by then President Steven C. Beering in 1999.

Purdue Agriculture accounts for about 11 percent of the enrollment at the West Lafayette campus. But of the 267 faculty members inducted into the Book of Great Teachers, 47, or almost 18 percent, represented Purdue Agriculture.

And the students have been every bit as successful as the faculty in achieving excellence in the classroom.

Seven of the last 10 winners of the annual G.A. Ross Award honoring the outstanding male student have represented Purdue Agriculture. The 2004 winner of the Flora Roberts Award honoring the outstanding senior woman went to an agricultural education graduate, Stephanie Warner.

The strategic plan initiative of 2000 required efforts to recruit not only a diverse faculty but also a more diverse student body to Purdue Agriculture.

“I think we have turned the corner on getting a higher number of minority students enrolled in Purdue Agriculture,” says Lechtenberg. “We’ve gone from about 4 percent minority enrollment to about 13 percent in our incoming class of students. If we can maintain that, or possibly get upwards of 15 percent, I feel that we would be making real headway.”

In terms of overall enrollment in the College of Agriculture, Lechtenberg would like to see a slight increase in undergraduate enrollment to around 2,500 students.

“I think we should continue to grow a little bit on the undergraduate level,” says Lechtenberg. “But it is not a question of just getting more students; it’s a question of getting a few more of the higher performing high school students into Purdue Agriculture. That has been a challenge for us in the past. We’re working hard to get there, and we have been getting some very good students to enroll in Purdue Agriculture.”

The average SAT score of incoming freshmen in the College of Agriculture is 1,060, an increase of 19 points from five years ago.

And like a kid getting a new bike for a straight-A report card, those high-achieving students entering the College of Agriculture are being rewarded with increasing amounts of scholarship monies.

This fall, Purdue Agriculture distributed more than $300,000 in Scholarship Awards of Excellence to 202 students, more than double the numbers from just two years ago.

“That’s a good sign that we are moving in the right direction,” says Lechtenberg.

And once those students enroll, they are challenged with an ever-evolving curriculum designed to produce graduates who are able to compete for the top jobs.

“I think we’ve made some pretty good progress during the past 10 to 15 years,” Lechtenberg says. “I think the Purdue Agriculture curriculum is very good, as strong as we’ve ever had.”

That curriculum is based on advancing production agriculture, but it also is moving into leading-edge sciences like nanotechnology and genetic engineering.

“We are engaged in conversations with Health Sciences and Indiana University about developing a full-fledged bachelor’s degree in forensic science,” Woodson says. “Our goal is to develop a program that would be approved by the Commission of Higher Education.

“Entomology is a big player in that field, and I think it is a real growth opportunity for us in that area.”

Woodson would also like to get conversations started about developing a professional master’s program for life scientists.

“We can educate and train great scientists, but that doesn’t mean they are going to be great business people,” Woodson says.

“An emerging idea is that we can have a dual-career track where we are educating great scientists in agricultural life sciences while setting them up to complete a professional master’s degree in business as well.”

But the main focus of teaching cutting-edge science will not change.

“The real advances in our economy are going to be driven by the life sciences and information sciences,” Woodson says. “We’ll focus on how to manage information and how to make sense of it.

“The growth in industry seems to be following that trend, especially in the pharmaceutical, agricultural biotechnology and health sciences industries. And in agriculture, the detection of microbes, food safety—all of these things—are driven by life science discoveries.”

But to make those discoveries, there must be students at the graduate-school level. Lechtenberg says a 25 percent enrollment increase is attainable.

“That’s an area where we have not been as successful as I would have liked,” Lechtenberg says. “We just don’t have as many graduate students on our campus as we should.”

While Purdue Agriculture’s sponsored research awards have increased from $22.5 million in 1995 to $39.6 million in 2003 (see chart below), the number of graduate students has remained steady.

“Increasing our graduate student enrollment is a high priority for us,” says Woodson.

But to increase enrollment, Purdue Agriculture needs new facilities or at least a facelift.

“We realize we have some challenges ahead of us with our facilities,” Woodson says. “Certainly, some of our shortcomings impact our ability to recruit faculty and, to a certain extent, it impacts our ability to recruit graduate students as well.”

“Facilities is an area that continues to be a challenge for us,” Lechtenberg says. “We don’t have as much square footage as we need, and too much of what we have is not up to date. We really need some additional laboratory and research buildings. That needs to be a priority for the immediate future.”

The Pfendler Hall project helped. Classrooms and lab space remodeled and rededicated earlier this year eased a space crunch for the forestry and natural resources department. But since 1979 only two new research facilities have been built on the Purdue Agriculture campus: the Food Science Building and Whistler Agricultural Research Building.

“Pfendler Hall is a great example of a facility that was completed with no state dollars invested,” says Woodson. “It came entirely from private funding. So did the Daniel Turfgrass Research and Diagnostic Center. So there are a lot of great examples where friends and alumni of Purdue have been terrific in helping us improve the situation.”

Woodson knows that a big part of the next dean’s job must be improving infrastructure.

But until the state budget crunch eases, Woodson admits that progress could be as slow as watching corn grow.

“We’re doing everything we can to fix it,” he says. “We are investing every spare dime we have in the school to try to improve our farms, our labs and our classrooms. But we don’t have a lot of spare dollars to go around.”

For Purdue’s next dean of agriculture, the bar has been set high by those who have gone before—a steady pace of progress starting with John H. Skinner and continuing right through Vic Lechtenberg. The future only becomes a challenge for those with lofty goals and ambitions to strengthen the university by recruiting the best teachers and producing the best graduates with the available resources.

“If you travel around the country and even around the world, you find Purdue Agriculture graduates in leadership positions everywhere you turn,” Woodson says. “We want to make sure, when future deans and future alumni are traveling around the country and around the world, that Purdue Agriculture graduates are still some of the prime movers and shakers in agriculture, food and natural resources. And to do that, we need to make sure we have the strongest possible program.”

Transition continued on the next page