RIAES/CE Plan of Work
(Archive | Logan | COM Department)(PDF Version of Full Plan)
In July 1999, I began a two year dual-director assignment, administering both the Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension. I saw this as a great opportunity to effect significant organizational change in these two Land Grant programs.
By 1999, Cooperative Extension at URI had been wandering for four years. It had been stripped away from the College of Resource Development in the mid 1990's and moved under the Research Office. As Experiment Station Director, I had communicated with the two interim CE Directors, David Caruso and Howard Foster, and we had agreed on principles for joint priority setting and management, but had otherwise not integrated the programs of either into the other.
Following the Agricultural Research, Extension, and Education Reform Act of 1998 (AREERA)—generally referred to as the 1998 Farm Bill—there were significant USDA pressures to unify the research and outreach agendas of the Land Grant programs. Rhode Island had a strong external incentive to change organizational structure: Washington was demanding it!
More importantly, the austere funding of both the Station and Extension—worst in the nation by all measures—signified that the Rhode Island Land Grant Programs were failing to convey to the public their inherent huge and singular value. Simply put, there was no effective way to demonstrate return on institutional (URI) or broader taxpayer (i.e., via the legislature) investment. What was clearly needed was a change of orientation in both the Station and Extension. Extension suffered from arthritic rigidity, stuck with an employee base with a statutary job-entitlement mentality, with a cadre of unionized employees (the majority of whom perform outstanding service in very difficult situations to this day, but a few of whom were clearly unproductive and overly comfortable within the protection afforded by state statutes and union rules). It hadn't gone anywhere in several years, and didn't appear to be likely to change. The Station was performing valuable work, but with too much of its agenda driven by faculty habit, oblivious to any sense of obligation to address society's needs.
The first step toward integrating Extension and the Station was to write a unified five-year Plan of Work, which I submitted within two weeks of accepting the CE interim directorship in July 2000. The Plan called for refocusing the Station toward specific outcomes, under seven program areas. It also dealt with the difficult issue of driving the land grant agenda through stakeholder listening. A good intention from USDA and the Congress, this is nearly impossible to implement. Consider, for example, the difficulty of setting program agendas within the resource conservation program area by listening to the nearly 300 environmental organizations in Rhode Island!
Nevertheless, the Plan succeeded in providing a unifying framework for integration of RIAES and RICE, and for accomplishing the reorientation of the RI Land Grant programs via an outcome funding approach. Implemented in the FY2001 and FY2002 AES RFP, the Plan represents a major cultural reform of the Station, and prepares CE for similar advancement in the future.