Photo by Tom Campbell Vic Lechtenberg (left) and Randy Woodson have worked to make the transition in the dean of agriculture’s office seamless.

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“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.”