WSU President Elson Floyd checks out neighborhood

Floyd speaks to locals at Hill-Ray Plaza.

Stressing the need for the university to focus on its local community, WSU President Elson Floyd spoke to locals at a series of meetings in Colfax last Thursday afternoon, April 8.

“We have been so successful in this global engagement that we have forgotten the states we’re in,” he said. “The university needs to start making an influence on our local community. If we do that, our influence on the state, the nation and the world should follow.”

The Colfax stop was one of several Floyd made at various locations around the state. He said the thrust of his tour is to hear from the private sector how the university is meeting local needs.

For Whitman County, that primarily means agricultural research.

Floyd, who was named the school’s president in 2007, said WSU needs to return its focus to putting agricultural research into the hands of farmers.

“We would simply not exist without farmers and ranchers,” he told a crowd of locals at a town hall meeting at Hill-Ray Plaza Thursday night. “Going back to ag is what we need to do.”

Dan Bernardo, dean of the school’s College of agricultural, human and natural resources sciences, spoke of Floyd’s commitment to supporting agricultural.

“WSU has a president that is convinced ag is the number one priority,” said Bernardo.

Some, though, thought the WSU president’s message about the university’s ag focus should be directed at audiences on the other side of the Cascade crest.

“When you speak to Whitman County you’re singing to the choir,” said Scott Cocking, a pork producer and farmer from the Farmington area, who was at Floyd’s Hill-Ray meeting Thursday night.

“We know how important agriculture is,” Floyd agreed.

He said students he spoke to in the Puget Sound area were unfamiliar with where their food comes from. He cited an example of students he spoke to in the Seattle area who thought carrots grow on trees.

Bernardo said the university’s centers in Mount Vernon and Puyallup provide front doors to western Washington markets. He particularly noted the importance of the Puyallup center in connecting WSU’s ag research to the Legislature.

“We have to stress the economic impact to the west side of east side agriculture,” he said.

Arun Raha, Washington’s chief economist, said that should be easy. Agricultural products account for 17 percent of the state’s exports, he said. That is an important piece to the state’s economy, which is heavily based on trade with foreign markets.

“We are, in fact, the nation’s most trade-intensive state,” said Raha.

Selling that message, however, may be tough as WSU deals with dwindling funding from state coffers.

In 1993, the state paid two-thirds of the cost of educating students at WSU, he said. Today that number has reversed.

“When the legislature built our budget, it was built on the assumption that tuition costs would go up,” said Floyd.

However, university officials decided they would not use proceeds from the 14 percent tuition increase to fund programs like extension and 4H.

“We simply could not justify using tuition dollars to fund extension,” he said.

So the school had to look for alternatives.

Last year, when the legislature built WSU’s budget for 2009 and 2010, it cut 10.2 percent of the school’s funding, which equates to roughly $54 million. Floyd said he expects another $13 million to $14 million in cuts to the school’s budget from this year’s supplemental session.

“That’s tough. That is really, really tough for an institution to maintain its viability,” he told the Hill-Ray crowd.

Floyd pointed to the school’s efforts at securing external grants to fill in gaps in state funding. In the last year, he said, WSU has received $325 million from outside grants and by contracting out university services.

Rhodd McIntosh, a farmer and rancher from the Albion area, cautioned Floyd at his afternoon session that those grants often come with strings attached. If research money comes from private companies, he said, that research risks the danger of being tailored to fit the needs of those companies.

“Absolutely, they can’t be too cozy,” said Floyd. “You have to have serious firewalls in place.”

He pointed to recent efforts by chemical company Monsanto to patent germplasm.

“At what point do those companies get the right to patent the intellectual property developed by university research?” he asked. “There are some thunder clouds out there on the horizon.”

WSU also decided to do away with programs that were not up to the administration’s par to find more funding.

“We owe it to our alumni to provide a world class institution from top to bottom for our students,” he told the Gazette in an afternoon interview. “So we decided to shift money from programs that were not performing to programs that were.”

Among those casualties were the university’s theater and dance departments.

“That was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make,” he said. “But if we had chosen to make simple across the board cuts, it would have watered down our programs.”

Because of the investment needed to bring those departments up to standard, the administration decided to cancel the program and shuttle theater and dance students to the University of Idaho.

Now, the university is focusing its efforts on training employees for the unique economies of Washington through its satellite campuses in Spokane, Vancouver and the Tri-Cities.

Floyd pointed to the commitment to developing health services programs at the Spokane campus.

“We are on the verge of having a four-year medical experience in Spokane,” he said. “That’s just the kind of commitment we need to have to meeting the needs of our local work forces.”