The University of Washington is in the planning stages of developing a college for the study of the environment, said the UW’s President Mark Emmert in a Board of Regents meeting Thursday.

The UW currently has about 400 faculty members focusing on environment related topics, but there is no school that brings their talent together into a focus for students, he added.

Provost and Executive Vice President, Phyllis Wise, is heading up the discussion of how the program will work. It doesn’t even have an official name yet.

Although the global warming issue will likely be a part of the program, it won’t be the sole focus of the program.

“It’s far more than just climate, it’s energy. … It’s the clashing and tension between urbanization and conservation, it’s issues of global and environment health. … I don’t think this is trendy at all,” Wise said.

Wise has spoken with about 125 faculty members on the topic. In June 2007, in order to narrow down the conversation to a few possible solutions, she organized an intense day-long meeting with about 30 faculty members.

“The idea really came from multiple conversations I’ve had with faculty over the past few years,” Wise said. “Sometimes the same thing comes up several times, and you begin [to see] this is an issue you should really pay attention to.”

Wise is also taking a look at other universities and how they decided to run their program.

“What we’re trying to do, frankly, is learn from the mistakes of other universities,” Emmert said.

Currently, the UW has the Program of the Environment (PoE), which already reports to several schools. The PoE won’t be replaced, but it won’t necessarily be at the center of the program either, Wise said.

Several programs, such as Forest Services and the Department of Ocean and Fisheries Sciences, also have environment programs, but aren’t coordinated optimally, Wise said.

Administration foresees faculty with joint appointments; they’ll teach in both the new school and their current departments.

“If we could bring them altogether into one college, then the whole would be really greater than some of its parts,” Arkans said.

They hope to have a functional model for the school during the calendar year of 2008, Wise said.

“We don’t have any organizational mechanism to sum them up into some really strong unit,” Emmert said.

There is the hope that the program will also attract new faculty to the school.

“If we can pull together a college of the environment, and then go out and attract the other top scientists who are working on these types of things … then sure,” Arkans said.

[Reach reporter Celeste Flint at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]