Listening Session Summary: Virginia Cooperative Extension

Presidential Search Listening Session

Extension leadership · Virginia Cooperative Extension — July 28, 2026
(AI-generated summary from event transcription)

Session-Level Summary

Extension leadership wants the search committee to hear one thing above all: the next president should be a genuine believer in the land-grant system and should treat Virginia Cooperative Extension as an asset of the university rather than a peripheral operation. Two requests were made. Participants request recognition by counting extension work in promotion and tenure consideration, saying “outreach, engagement, and extension” rather than dropping the third word; and having university leadership visit local Extension offices while traveling the Commonwealth. Other participants volunteered on the spot to help arrange. The second request is for capacity, which was the qualification attached to nearly every ambition raised: staff across 107 local offices already carry a full workload, and demand for Extension as a translational science partner exceeds what it can currently serve. Participants also relayed widespread sentiment from agricultural and natural resources communities that the university is straying from its land-grant roots, and they paired their asks with appreciation for the current administration’s embrace of the land-grant mission.

Cross-Category Observations

Nearly every theme in this session resolves into one of two requests. The first is recognition: value the land-grant mission, name Extension in the university’s own language, count Extension work in promotion and tenure, and be present in local offices. The second is capacity: fund positions, grow the Agency 229 land-grant funding line, and do not assume a workforce that is already at full capacity can absorb new work. The recognition requests are inexpensive, and participants made them easy to act on by naming the specific words, visits, and statements that would satisfy them. The capacity request is the expensive one, and it is attached as a condition to nearly every ambition the group described.

Asked directly about barriers, participants stated that few people, inside or outside the university, appreciate the range of what Extension does. That concern recurs as a strategic priority, in the missing third word in “outreach, engagement, and extension” and in the wish that more Virginians understood the full range of what Extension offers.

Appreciation and warning were conveyed together. Participants credited the current administration’s embrace of the land-grant mission, a genuinely collaborative recent budget cycle, and the quality of the university-level response they received when they raised promotion and tenure concerns, while at the same time warned about an earlier era when the university treated their funding line as a competitor for state resources, and about a promotion and tenure problem that persists regardless of what leadership says it values. The choice this poses for the search committee is whether to treat as settled a relationship that participants describe as both recently improved and historically fragile. Flattening it into either satisfaction or grievance would misrepresent them.

Theme Detail

Themes are grouped by category. Within each category, themes raised by multiple attendees appear first; themes raised by a single attendee follow.

Presidential Qualities

A president who is a genuine supporter of the land-grant system
Participants want a president who believes in the land-grant model rather than merely inheriting it, and who treats Cooperative Extension as an asset of the university rather than a peripheral operation. The framing was forward-looking rather than defensive: keep expanding and innovating but honor the constituencies that built the institution. One participant paired the point with a plain instruction, not to forget who brought the university here. Stated directly as a quality of the person by more than one participant, the same disposition underlies input in every other category of this session, and it was the deliberate first statement of the hour, offered before introductions.
A president who is seen in local Extension offices
This was raised by a single participant, who described the relationship with the university as good but not yet genuine collaboration, and named presence as the gap. If the president’s leadership team visited local Extension offices while traveling the Commonwealth and simply asked staff about their programming and impact, it would matter for morale and would help staff feel part of one university that includes Extension. Asked directly how often university leadership is seen, the participant said visits are infrequent and usually reach a district office rather than a local one. Other participants volunteered within seconds to help arrange such visits, and noted that discussions were already under way about showing Board members local offices and the Agricultural Research and Extension Centers. The search committee chair responded that such a tour would be welcome, and asked that the request be brought forward through the college’s leadership.
A president who sets the tone on whether Extension work counts
A single participant wants a president who reinforces that Extension work is valued equally alongside research and teaching in promotion processes and on committees. The consequence of silence is concrete: new faculty are told by peers that an Extension appointment will not get them promoted, and they redirect their effort accordingly. Although this was one voice on the president’s specific role, the underlying concern was the most persistent subject of the session, and this was the last substantive statement of the hour.

Strategic Priorities

Extension as the university’s translational science partner
Participants want Extension understood as the arm that carries research into communities, which they describe as its original mission, and they want that role activated across the whole university rather than concentrated in agriculture. The ask is not an Extension presence in every college, but every college valuing what Extension can do for translational science and community participatory research. Participants named computer science, sociology, and the arts as disciplines that need the communities where Extension already has a presence. This is also the stated aspiration of Extension’s own new strategic plan, produced through a year-long planning process and offered to the search committee chair during the session.
A stronger focus on Virginia and the region
Asked what successes they would want to be discussing five years out, participants said Virginia Tech’s successes should be focused on Virginia and the region as well as internationally, and that recent emphasis has leaned heavily toward the international. The request is for rebalancing rather than retrenchment: one participant paired it with building further on Virginia Tech’s growing national standing as a land-grant and Extension leader, and another hoped Extension would be recognized for its relevance through relationships across the Commonwealth. They want the state and regional emphasis restored without giving up national and international ambition.
Naming Extension in how the university describes its own work
When the university refers to outreach and engagement in its strategic plan, participants want the phrase to be “outreach, engagement, and extension,” because the third word gets left off even though what the country recognizes as Extension covers outreach, engagement, interventions, and services. The same participants want far more Virginians to understand what Extension is and the full range of what it offers, since today most learn it only incidentally through contact with an agent.
Workforce development, credentials, and the youth pipeline
Participants want to see an emphasis on workforce development and want the next president to understand that the roughly 300,000 youth served annually through Extension programs bring value to the university whether or not they enroll as students. 4-H, FFA, and the career and technical student organizations have done workforce development for over a century. Participants also want corporate partnerships to move beyond financial giving into work-based learning, and described Extension building outward-facing paid online courses and micro-credentials for adults and potentially youth, on the view that the Virginia Tech and Virginia Cooperative Extension identities give a credential gravitas. A participant added a scope correction rather than a disagreement: Extension already does substantial hands-on credentialing in the field, so the new work extends existing practice rather than departing from it.
Leveraging Extension’s statewide footprint as a university asset
Participants put the footprint itself forward as the opportunity: 107 offices across the Commonwealth, plus six 4-H educational centers that host the camping program and are geographically distributed residential facilities the university could use for workforce development and other work. One participant framed the point as the question they would put to a presidential candidate, asking how a president would leverage 107 offices to strengthen Virginia Tech. When the 4-H centers came up, the search committee chair noted familiarity with one of the six but not the others, which participants treated as illustrative of the visibility problem rather than as a criticism.
Applied and experiential learning for students through Extension
Participants want more students, particularly doctoral students, getting applied experience that shows them how their research benefits industry, community, society, or families. A graduate extension assistantship began in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences this year, Extension hosts undergraduate interns in offices across the Commonwealth every summer, and it is working with Carilion Clinic on how medical students might participate. Growth is limited to what Extension can fund itself, and participants would like the rest of the university to invest in these statewide opportunities. One participant described the integration of the three land-grant missions, with students working directly with communities, publishing the research, then translating it back, as the most rewarding part of the work.
Health system partnerships as a growth strategy
This was raised by a single participant. Extension partners deliberately with university-based health systems because that is where the research component lives, including a practice-based research network of family practices that have already agreed to host research. The working principle is to partner with whoever is already doing the work Extension wants to do. The goal is a consortium of multiple academic campuses, which is what wins large regional grants, and getting there requires staying on the current path, continued investment, and additional capacity from the General Assembly. The participant described this as the deliberate pivot after a regional translational science alliance sunset, and said Extension is a few years away but on track.
Preserving Extension’s role in shaping the Agency 229 budget ask
This was raised by a single participant, as part of a prepared list of asks for the incoming president. Extension hopes the new administration and Board will continue the collaborative six-year budget planning process, in which stakeholder-developed requests move through the president’s team and the Board. The participant noted that Extension respects the hierarchy and is only making stakeholder-informed suggestions but wants its role in shaping the agency’s requests preserved.
Counting Extension in the university’s engagement record
This was raised by a single participant. Extension wants its role recognized in making Virginia Tech an engaged campus, including in the Carnegie community engagement designation work, and can now contribute impact data on Extension activity that it has never had before through a new statewide reporting system. Extension also conducts economic impact assessments and uses documentable community impact as a criterion when deciding whether to fund proposed work. Participants treated the new availability of this data as what makes both this ask and the promotion and tenure ask newly actionable.
A broadening and changing citizen audience
This was raised by a single participant, in one connected vision statement. The terrain of agriculture is changing and Extension needs to help citizens pivot with it, across commercial producers, homesteaders, and people pursuing sustainable living practices. Thriving families are part of the mission, including people being able to cook their own food and preserve it safely. The participant framed the goal as closing not only the education gap within Virginia’s populations but the application gap.
Recognition of Extension volunteers
This was raised by a single participant, in the same turn as the theme above. Volunteers work hard for free, do a great deal of work on Extension’s behalf, and bridge gaps, and their value should be recognized.

Challenges

Promotion and tenure credit for Extension work
The most persistent theme of the session and its closing subject, raised by several participants. Participants want Extension work to count in promotion and tenure, not in place of research, teaching, or graduate mentoring but valued alongside them; a statement to that effect from an incoming administration would be a powerful message. Participants set the bar themselves: it should count where there is documented scholarship, grantsmanship, and economic impact, not for merely teaching a workshop. Underlying the ask is a measurement mismatch. Faculty elsewhere in the university measure success in publications, grant dollars, graduate students, and conference presentations, and Extension reports those as well, but it measures success by the changes citizens make in their lives. Participants continue to hear from colleagues on split appointments that the Extension portion is not valued, and said assistant professors with good ideas are discouraged from pursuing them. Participants also noted that broad university policies are sometimes made without accounting for the fact that Extension faculty, including those staffing local offices, go through promotion and that their process can look different. The theme drew immediate audible agreement across speakers. The search committee chair acknowledged the theme and said it was helpful and made no commitment on it at any point in the session.
Capacity as the binding constraint
The session’s second-strongest recurring theme, raised by several participants in three unrelated contexts, and the qualification attached to nearly every ambition described. Demand for Extension as a translational science partner already exceeds its capacity: researchers respond strongly when they learn about the statewide network and its community connections, and participants said capacity has to be built before that demand can be served. Agents and staff in the 107 offices already carry a full workload, so participants asked that the model be one in which a college winning a large grant funds new Extension faculty, rather than assuming existing staff can absorb the work. Programming lags on drones, advanced applications of artificial intelligence, and virtual fencing, and growth in Agency 229 funding and personnel is the key to delivering it. Extension specialists, who are applied researchers, have drone experience, and several already run field demonstrations with agents at the Agricultural Research and Extension Centers. The constraint is not skill but how much equipment an individual office can house, since some offices are very small depending on what the county government can afford.
Limited understanding of Extension’s scope, inside and outside the university
Asked directly by the search firm representative what barriers a president could remove, participants named this one first. Most people, if they have heard of Extension at all, do not appreciate the range of what it does, from public health to natural resources to agricultural production and innovation, youth development, and workforce development. If university leadership understood the scope, leaders could refer deans and other colleagues to Extension when community projects arise. A second participant put the same problem in institutional terms: the last few years have shown how much attention the university needs to pay to communicating what it does and why it matters, and the institution talks a great deal about outreach without mentioning Extension as often as it should.
A perception that Virginia Tech is straying from its land-grant roots
This was raised by a single participant, who relayed it explicitly as something heard repeatedly over the years rather than as a personal view: the agricultural and natural resources communities feel Virginia Tech is losing its roots and straying from the land-grant mission, given the highly publicized focus on the Amazon-anchored Innovation Campus and Northern Virginia. The prescription attached to it was to keep expanding and innovating while honoring the traditional constituencies of the land-grant mission. The search committee chair audibly agreed with that prescription. This is a case where frequency understates weight: one speaker, reporting accumulated feedback from an external constituency, and it converges with the call for a stronger state and regional emphasis raised independently earlier in the session.
History of Agency 229 treated as a budget competitor
This was raised by a single participant, deliberately as a caution for the incoming president and grounded in decades of experience with Extension. There was a long stretch when the university treated Agency 229, the Cooperative Extension and Agricultural Experiment Station funding line, as a competitor for General Assembly resources and almost never supported an Agency 229 budget request, and the participant hopes the university never returns to that posture. In the same breath, the same participant said the relationship has substantially improved: advancements in partnership with the university administration over roughly the past five years, strong relationships across recent Extension leadership, and a recent budget request formally supported by the university.
Structural barriers between Extension and the rest of campus
This was raised by a single participant, as work in progress rather than a grievance. There are real barriers to collaboration between Extension and the rest of the university. Reducing them was an explicit charge from the previous provost in conjunction with the vice president for outreach and international affairs, and that charge produced results: partnerships with the outreach and engagement centers, co-location of an Extension office in the Roanoke Higher Education Center, and support for a community viability extension specialist housed in a central engagement unit.
Loss of a regional translational science vehicle
This was raised by a single participant. A clinical and translational science alliance among the University of Virginia, Carilion Clinic, and Virginia Tech was sunset when funding was discontinued after five years. Extension was the piece the partners specifically wanted because it carried translational science into communities. The relationships it built persist, but the vehicle is gone. This was the only concrete institutional loss described in the session, and the health system partnership strategy described under Strategic Priorities is explicitly a response to it.

What to Preserve

Health system partnerships and the health extension model
The most developed body of input in this category, expanded at the search committee chair’s request. Extension has working partnerships with most of the Commonwealth’s major health systems, including Carilion Clinic, VCU Health, and UVA Health, and is jointly developing community health needs assessments with their community outreach teams. Public health has been part of Extension’s work for over a century, and today’s version brings screenings, detection, and in some cases care into communities. The health extension model describing this collaboration has been documented in clinical trials, and Virginia Cooperative Extension is now only the second Extension system in the country eligible for Medicare billing, for one of its diabetes management programs. The mechanics matter to participants: advisory council cross-membership is used deliberately to cross-pollinate the university’s two health campuses, aligning the university’s public health practice and research center with Extension’s health and well-being initiative makes community health work seamless, collaboration with the medical school continues through its health systems and implementation science department, and Extension budget support underwrites postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and summer salary for medical school faculty who collaborate with Extension. Participants presented all of this as evidence of a national-caliber asset rather than an aspiration, with the Medicare billing eligibility as the proof point.
A collaborative relationship with the current administration and Board
Participants said the current university administration embraces the land-grant mission and that Extension is appreciative, and the implicit ask throughout the session was continuity rather than change. The concrete evidence offered was the recent Agency 229 six-year asks, where three stakeholder-developed requests moved through the president’s team and the Board and produced an actual base capacity increase plus partial support for an agricultural business cohort, with senior administrators and the president described as personally spending time in Richmond on it. Participants also credited the Government Relations Office for stewarding the budget process, and said Extension has valued the courtesy, the endorsements, and even the critical feedback that strengthened one of its budget proposals. The search committee is asked to preserve something participants describe as both recently improved and historically fragile.
The local office as the university’s front door, and agents as irreplaceable
Participants described Beyond Boundaries as essentially a description of what Extension already does, taking the land-grant mission beyond the boundaries of the university to citizens across and beyond the state through a national network of more than 3,000 local offices. The local Extension office is the front door to the university for its community, which one participant called simply a fact rather than a claim. A second participant made the sharper version of the point: there is a great deal of talk about artificial intelligence, but agents in the field help people to apply what they learn. The human value of the network was the most emphatic statement in the session.
Field-based credentialing and what small investments produce
Participants wanted it on the record that Extension already does substantial hands-on credentialing for the agricultural community in the field, including beef quality assurance and pesticide safety education. A second participant offered a concrete illustration of the return on modest resources: a small request funded a portable set of certified scales that traveled to five 4-H livestock shows and sales this summer, letting hundreds of youth and many adults learn to use certified weighing technology the way a business would. That participant acknowledged the example was deep in the weeds but pressed it as pertinent to the agricultural questions raised, which reads as a group concern that the agricultural core not be lost in the health campus material.
Multistate and regional Extension collaboration
Asked whether Extension can work across state lines, participants described both active projects and standing structure. A federally funded hurricane recovery project, centered in Southwest Virginia, is run with Extension colleagues in North Carolina and Tennessee. The coordination is structural rather than ad hoc: a coordinating group links the regions’ executive directors, the directors meet monthly, and states trade strengths on disaster preparedness, workforce development, artificial intelligence, and invasive species. Geographic partners were described as Extension’s biggest strength, both for cost-effectiveness and for mutual aid in disasters, including hay transfers to support livestock.
Partnering rather than duplicating with campus units
This was raised by a single participant. Extension partners closely with the central economic and community engagement unit and its community viability faculty, because the work they do is exactly what Extension does, sharing resources and writing grants together.
The Agricultural Research and Extension Centers
This was raised by a single participant as institutional description. The land-grant assets include 11 Agricultural Research and Extension Centers conducting applied research across the Commonwealth, mainly in agriculture and life sciences but also in seafood and food safety.The network was described rather than represented in the room.

Presidential Search Process

No process issues were raised in this session. This constituency used the time to make an institutional case for Cooperative Extension’s standing, addressed through the search to an incoming president. For comparison, process concerns accounted for 21 of 36 items in the May 11 faculty and staff listening session.