Mission central: Incorporating natural areas as outdoor labs in campus strategic goals and master planning

Campus administrators typically treat natural areas as “open space” and fail to provide the same level of commitment to them as indoor labs. Faculty must challenge this notion and clearly demonstrate how developing outdoor laboratories is central to the university’s mission and critical to student success, recruitment and retention.  By establishing indoor and outdoor labs as equivalent in the administrative mindset,  allocating resources for their creation, improvement and maintenance becomes a normal part of the budgeting process.  Although the pedagogical value of outdoor labs is well established, their impact on student recruitment and retention is not and needs greater attention.