With an outside, and influential advocate, this situation is less likely to be a problem in the tenure decision. Many environmental programs have no space allocated specifically for that program's faculty and students. As a result, faculty are assigned space in a home department, leading to a situation in which their daily encounters are with the faculty in that department and not necessarily with the faculty in the environmental program. Similarly, the students have no place to congregate in which they are likely to be surrounded by other students in the program. This leads to a loss of professional networking and to a loss of cohesion and identify amongst the students.
Successful programs require space dedicated to the faculty and students in that program.
Ideally, the space should be flexible, since faculty interests in interdisciplinary fields generally change more rapidly than in more traditional disciplines. New faculty positions. One vision is to hire through the mechanisms of departments, choosing new faculty who are defined first by allegiance to a discipline and secondarily apply that discipline to environmental analysis. Another vision is to recognize that the existing university landscape may not be optimal for the definition of new environmental positions, and to hire new faculty in areas that are not defined at all by disciplinary focus. For example, rather than hiring an economist who focuses on environmental economics, a program might hire someone trained in ecological economics.