The University of Arizona's oldest academic unit, the College of Agriculture, has changed its name to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The change became effective June 7 and the official acronym for the college is CALS.

The change was made to more accurately reflect the interdisciplinary focus of the college, which includes teaching, research, and extension programs in not only the agricultural sciences, but also in renewable natural resources and family and consumer sciences.

Contact Information Eugene Sander 520.621.7621

"The old name simply did not reflect the activities of the college and was misleading to our students, their prospective employers, and other statewide clientele," said Eugene Sander, vice provost and dean of the renamed college. Similar name changes have already been made by colleges of agriculture in several of our peer institutions, including Cornell, Wisconsin, Texas A&M and North Carolina State - all universities where, like Arizona, life sciences and biology are practiced widely across the campus."

Established as the first college at the UA in 1889, CALS has since expanded its programs beyond the conventional description of agriculture to include an emphasis on the fundamental life sciences that form the basis of agriculture and other fields of study in the college. Courses are currently cross-listed with the UA colleges of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture; Education; Engineering and Mines; Medicine; Pharmacy; Science; and Social and Behavioral Sciences.

CALS has more departments and faculty involved in life sciences research (involving plants, animals, and humans) than any other UA college except Medicine. The life science departments and schools within the college include agricultural and biosystems engineering; animal sciences; arid lands studies; entomology; family and consumer sciences; nutritional sciences; plant pathology; plant sciences; renewable natural resources; soil, water and environmental science; and veterinary science and microbiology.

About 85 percent of the 41 degrees currently offered in the college are related to the life sciences; in research, over 70 percent of the funded research is in the life sciences.

"At the same time, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences does not claim to be the exclusive locus of life science disciplines that span the entire university," Sander said. "And we are justifiably proud of our long and continued association with agribusiness and agriculture, both nationally and in Arizona. Agriculture is one of the most important life sciences.
"The impact of the work of colleges like ours, on agriculture in its broadest terms, has caused the industry to have a value of over a trillion dollars annually and allowed the American public to feed itself for about ten percent of its after-tax income."