On August 22, we begin a new year of delivering on our oldest mission. We make perhaps our farthest-reaching impact through teaching because in so doing we prepare others to make great impact.
Every instructor as well as every staff member who supports those instructors contributes to this mission, as do our inspiring students. To all who are engaged in teaching and learning, I welcome you back for the 2024-25 academic year.
For a decade, Dean Elaine Turner has led teaching and learning at the UF/IFAS College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. She has always kept impact front and center in her vision. She calls it producing society-ready graduates.
A CALS education offers insights into the frontiers of knowledge, such as artificial intelligence. It offers opportunity through more than $700,000 in scholarships to its students every year and experiential learning such as internships, study abroad and dozens of clubs.
What will be hardest to replace when Dr. Turner steps down as dean at the end of 2024 is what I call the “soul” of CALS. The dean has inspired her team to cultivate a family atmosphere in a college that has grown from 4,900 to 6,500 students under her leadership.
Her investment in academic advisers who have the passion and bandwidth to provide students individual attention gives students agency in mapping out their academic paths.
Her attention to non-academic needs includes playing a major role in establishing the Alan and Cathy Hitchcock Field & Fork Pantry so that no student suffers academically because of hunger.
Her inclusion of CALS ambassadors, Block & Bridle, MANRRS and other student groups in UF/IFAS events where they connect with mentors and role models teaches students to value relationships as well as knowledge.
Dean Turner frames a CALS education as one that prepares students for a life of service and of leadership. She sees a CALS education as one that gives its beneficiaries the tools to address grand challenges and thorny problems.
The transition in the dean’s office will be an historic moment. A decade is a long time even in the context of a 140-year-old college.
Milestones provide a prompt for us to reflect on what’s important. As the dean herself would surely say, it’s not about her, it’s about the mission.
We’re so successful in pursuing that mission because of Dean Turner’s ability to define, refine and support it.
Her legacy is in the corps of faculty who lead the nation in teaching awards from USDA-NIFA. It’s also in the achievement and passion of a generation of graduates who actually knew her name when they shook her hand at graduation.
Dean Turner will spend the next four months the way she has spent the last 10 years: relentlessly promoting teaching excellence. In fact, just last week she announced the establishment of the CALS Teaching and Learning Collaborative. This center not only adds to Dean Turner’s legacy but institutionalizes a commitment to teaching and learning that continues when she returns to the faculty part-time in January.
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