Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Welcome: Chairman Gerrard welcomed the group and introduced Bill Brown for comments. Brown commented that the he was glad to be here and work with group. The following are items Dr. Brown presented: UT Dean and Associates went to visit KY administrators and discussed budgets, and sharing physical and faculty resources. Dr. Brown reported that as we move forward in agriculture while experiencing budget and resources cuts, we will have to rethink how we meet the needs of our programs. We have to address the things we can control. Development of partnerships across academic areas/programs is becoming a necessity. Their discussions between UT and UK revolved around getting courses taught in an underfunded environment and how to maintain our missions of research and extension centers in Land Grant Universities. The department heads in the southern region can help develop mechanisms to impact academic programs across the region. Dr. Brown discussed the need to share facilities for both teaching and research endeavors. UT and KY have shared tobacco money in past years. Work needs to be done on how to fully participate in proposal linkage for the future. A discussion was held on issues with partnership from an administrative level on partnering in teaching common courses across departments. A model for all universities to prevent fighting the battle at local levels is needed. We must develop a way to make the system work. The technology is available; we just have to solve the administrative interaction. The discussion concluded with Dr. Gerrard asking each head to provide short bullets containing an inventory of strengths and weakness within each of our departments on faculty expertise, facilities, etc. These are to be sent to Dr. David Gerrard at Virginia Tech for compilation and sharing across the region.