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Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Granted, when it comes to technical, scientific and environmental partnerships linking higher education with “the real world,”  Clark County is not in a league with Research Triangle Park, N.C., or Silicon Valley, Calif. Not yet, anyway.

But at the pace things are going and the proposals being considered, including a possible university partnership with the Vancouver-based Cascades Volcano Observatory, who’s to say we won’t achieve that status one day? Certainly within the state, that reputation is on the upswing.

The twin catalysts of this trend have been the county’s high-tech industry and Washington State University Vancouver, which on Saturday will award degrees to 711 members of its 19th graduating class, with Gov. Chris Gregoire as speaker.

It is increasingly and dramatically evident that WSUV’s leaders here and in Pullman and its state-government enablers in Olympia are not content for the school to exist merely as a stepchild of the mother campus. Just last Friday, WSU regents approved a budget request to the 2009 Legislature with its No. 1 capital priority for the entire WSU system being $38.6 million for an applied technology classroom building on the Salmon Creek campus.

Call it local pride or provincialism, but in our view “branch campus” is getting to be insufficient as a descriptive term for WSUV. While education, public affairs and social sciences are a substantial part of the WSUV emphasis, the institution is building an identity in the earth sciences and  high-tech-related subjects. And the school is not limiting its vision to the 350-acre local campus, as evidenced by the recent proposal for an environmental science research center at a once-contaminated industrial site in Ridgefield.

Now, as Erik Robinson reported in Sunday’s Columbian, comes news that WSUV has been talking with the U.S. Geological Survey about that federal agency moving its volcano observatory from east Vancouver to the WSUV campus where, appropriately, there are views of three volcanic peaks: Mount Hood, Mount Adams and our volcanic pride and joy, Mount St. Helens.

“This is potentially one of the biggest things to happen at the Vancouver campus,” said Stephen Bollens, director of science programs at WSUV. “In terms of potential, it’s fabulous. It’s not just geology or volcanology, it’s a whole range of science and engineering disciplines that would benefit.”

Bollens is also a leader in the proposal for a research center on the polluted site of the former Pacific Wood Treating Co. on Lake River at the Port of Ridgefield. He has said such a center could examine water purity, aquatic life, atmospheric sciences, toxicology, erosion and biology.

WSUV Chancellor Hal Dengerink has endorsed that idea, saying, “We have a rather sizable commitment to research in environmental science. (This) looks like a perfect partnership” with the Port of Ridgefield. “It gives us an opportunity to do all this work in a more public kind of way.”

Obviously, such dreams are just that — dreams. But it wasn’t all that many years ago that a university campus in Clark County was, itself, a dream.