The Assessment Team in particular commended the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science for its support of the program and for the effective improvements in its governance and stakeholder involvement. The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science has been selected through a competitive process as the host of a new Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit for the Chesapeake Watershed. Once negotiations are completed, the new unit will be based at our Appalachian Laboratory and support research and educational activities through multiple federal agencies. We have assembled a number of partner institutions to participate in this program with us, including our sister institutions, the University of Maryland College Park and Frostburg State University, and the University of Virginia, University of the District of Columbia, George Mason University, and Pennsylvania State University. In some ways it is more difficult to sustain accomplishments than to achieve them.
Outstanding talent is difficult to recruit and to retain.
In recent years, we have experienced the loss of some very successful and nationally prominent members of our faculty, most often to take better compensated, leadership positions, such as departmental chairs and institute directors, at other institutions. This is why the additional investments for faculty recruitment and retention in our FY 2002 request are so important. The primary initiatives supported by additional appropriations over the past two years are enjoying remarkable success. I would like to review them for you briefly. This was based on the premise, articulated a decade ago by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Learning, that the responsibilities of faculty members extend beyond teaching and discovery resulting from research to include also both the integration of discoveries into the broader body of knowledge and the application of knowledge to consequential social problems.