Mark your directory or post a reminder, two major name changes have been approved. The College of Agriculture and Home Economics will henceforth and hitherto be referred to as the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences. Simlarly, Cooperative Extension has changed its name to simply Extension.
The acronym for the new college name is CAHNRS, pronounced conners. The new college name ends an eight-year-long effort to rename the College of Agriculture and Home Economics, said Interim Dean R. James Cook. The name change takes effect immediately, but Cook said the college will continue using stationery with the old name until supplies are exhausted.
The college name has included home economics since the colleges of agriculture and home economics were merged in 1982.
Cook said the name change was necessary to update the college’s image. Home economics has been a discipline at WSU for 100 years. But the nature of the field has changed dramatically and the term home economics no longer describes well the field of study. The change has been a national one.
When we submitted the proposed name change, WSU was one of only two major universities with a college of agriculture still using the name of home economics, said Cook. The name change reflects the fact that home economics has grown into the field known today as human sciences, now one of the fastest-growing areas in teaching, research and outreach in the United States.
Moreover, the departments in CAHNRS that represent the human sciences part of our mission are attracting and graduating more students than either the agricultural or natural resources programs in this college, and I’m delighted that human sciences is now part of our name. Cook also said, ‘Faculty also felt a need to reflect natural resources disciplines in the college name, so we took out home economics and added human and natural resource sciences. This more accurately reflects the nature of our modern institution, Cook said.
Cooperative Extension has been changed to Extension to reflect its expanded mission. Extension work has been part of the university’s mission since 1913. It operates noncredit educational programs for adults and youth in all 39 Washington counties.
Mike Tate, extension dean, said the word cooperative was dropped to reflect the university’s expanded commitment to outreach. The word cooperative has long been part of extension’s name. It signified the federal, state and county partnership that historically has provided the foundation of our public funding, Tate said. While we continue to rely on these three partners for funding, over time we have expanded our partnership definition to include other educational institutions. At the University of Washington, for example, we share a commitment to fund an extension position in the College of Forest Resources. We also share funding for one and soon two extension faculty in the Washington Sea Grant Program, which is based at the UW.
Tate said WSU’s 10 learning centers, which have helped increase access to higher education for place-bound adults, are a joint venture linking extension with several of the state’s community colleges. We also partner with four community colleges in the Partnership for Rural Improvement, he said. PRI is a consortium of educational institutions, government agencies and citizens based at Washington State University that act as a catalyst for community development.
The new name more accurately reflects extension’s evolving and expanding mission to serve life-long learning and economic development< needs of Washington State, Tate said.