George R. McDowell[1]
The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 was according to J.F.A. Taylor, “the charter of America’s quietest revolution.” The 17,430,000 acres of land in the public domain committed to finance the Land-Grant colleges – 30,000 acres per Senator and Congressman in each state – is not the thing to be attended in reflecting on the establishment of these institutions. Rather, it was the principle behind their establishment that was without historical precedent. That principle asserted that no part of human life and labor is beneath the notice of the university or without its proper dignity. Both by virtue of the character of their scholarship and whom they would serve, the Land-Grant universities were established as people’s universities. This was their social contract.
What were the dimensions of that social contract? What was revolutionary about it?
There are three ways in which the establishment of the Land-Grant universities from the Morrill Act through the Smith-Lever Act was revolutionary. The Land-Grants were revolutionary in terms of:
Prior to the 1862 Land-Grant institutions, higher education was reserved for, and helped preserve, the aristocracy of the society.[2] Being a university graduate was an imprimatur of high status. The Land-Grant universities opened classrooms to young people whose previous experiences were primarily in the cow barn, the kitchen, the forge or the coke oven. Liberty Hyde Bailey, America’s pre-eminent horticulturist, father of the discipline of horticulture in America, and dean of the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell from 1903-1913, wrote that:
Education was once exclusive: it is now in spirit inclusive. The agencies that have brought about this change of attitude are those associated with so-called industrial education, growing chiefly out of the forces set in motion by the Land Grant Act of 1862. This Land Grant is the Magna Charta of education: from it in this country we shall date our liberties (Peters 1998, 53).
As America enters the 21st Century, the national and individual ethic with respect to formal education is dominated by the expectation of access to higher education for all – it has become commonplace. Today we expect all young Americans, who are able, to go to college. Many of them expect to go on to graduate school at least for a Masters degree. Even though other developed nations have in recent years, emulated the U.S. experience with respect to this investment in higher education, still, during the period 1985-1991, the United States consistently reported the highest enrollment for 18-21 year-olds in tertiary education of all OECD countries[3] with enrollment rates between 33 and 38 percent (Peri, et. al 1997).
However, the access to higher education for the masses conveys only a part of the significance of these universities in the history of higher education in the world. There was an even more profoundly revolutionary idea embedded in the establishment and evolution of the Land-Grant universities than widespread higher education for ordinary citizens. It was, in Taylor’s terms, “that thought and action were indivorcible, that the place of the academy is in the world not beyond it, that it is the business of the university to demonstrate the connection of knowledge, art, and practice”(Taylor 1981, 37).
Prior to the Land-Grant universities the aristocrats of the world and of America were schooled in theology, the letters, law, and, in some few institutions patterned after the German universities like Johns Hopkins University, medicine. The Land-Grant view of scholarship directly challenged the prevailing norms of higher education at the time of their inception by making the work of cow barns, kitchens, coke ovens and forges the subject matter of their scholarship. In 1890 the Babcock test for butterfat content of milk was both a scientific advancement and a political/economic act necessary to rationalize markets for fluid milk.
Access to classroom instruction is not, and has not been, the only way in which the Land-Grant universities fulfilled their contract with Americans regarding public access to the knowledge they create, though that was the initial effort. After early agricultural scientists had demonstrated their ability to solve some of the practical agricultural problems, both the scholarly agenda and the access to knowledge were inextricably entwined at the Land-Grant colleges around 1900. By this time, farmers, hungry for solutions to their problems, clamored for the insights of the scientists. The claims on scientists’ time became so great that this outreach function of the university was formalized as the Cooperative Extension Service by the Smith-Lever Act of 1914.
The Smith-Lever Act was passed because the direct benefits sought by agricultural interests in their support of both the Morrill Act of 1862 and the Hatch Act, had not been forthcoming (Rainsford). Most students in the Land-Grant colleges did not study agriculture, even though they came from farm families; results of research and instruction did not reach farmers because they were not in college but on the farm.
This institutionalized form of public service has had a profound impact on the character of higher education in America. In describing the importance of this influence on American higher education Stephen R. Graubard, Editor of DAEDALUS, states in the 1997 preface to a DAEDALUS edition devoted to the American academic profession:
Without wishing to deny the importance of (the influences of the German and British universities), the uniqueness of the American system needs to be emphasized, and not only because of the Morrill Act and the innovations introduced by the land-grant principle, with its emphasis on research in agriculture and many other fields as well. The concept of “service” took on a wholly new meaning in state universities that pledged to assist their citizens in ways that had never previously been considered (Graubard 1997).
The Land-Grants were to be people’s universities. With the extension function in place by the passage of the Smith-Lever Act, the institutionalized access of ordinary people in the states to their state university was provided for with federal leadership. The Smith-Lever Act gave access to the university to people who could never qualify, nor want, to be its students. The federal government partner to the system was, and is, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) whose approximately one billion dollars of funding contributes to research and extension for a predominantly agricultural clientele.
This system that integrated research and extension has been, and is, hugely successful--for agricultural productivity, for the farmers who have survived the economic tests, and for American society--though many farmers have been made obsolete by the results of the system. The rate of return on investments in research and development and extension in agriculture are somewhere between 20 and 40 percent per annum. In a society whose long-term cost of government borrowing has seldom if ever been as high as 15 percent, it could be argued that government should borrow at 15 percent and gain returns of 20 percent by investing in agricultural research and extension (Alston and Pardey 1996). There was a time during the middle part of the 20th century that extension was adjudged to be the most trusted source of new knowledge for ordinary Americans--clearly an affirmation of the efficacy of the system.
In 1999 there were over 15,000 full time equivalents (FTE) extension staff associated with Land-Grant universities with offices in virtually every county of the country. Many of the extension staff have university faculty status whether they are located on the campus of the state’s Land-Grant university or in a county office. In the colleges of agriculture, which have the longest tradition with the formal extension function, large numbers of faculty members in academic departments have responsibilities for extension as well as teaching and/or research activities. In 1997 estimated total expenditures for this outreach function of the Land-Grant universities from all sources was just about 1.5 billion dollars of which federal funds were about 25 percent (USDA 1997).
Support for extension from both state and federal levels has generally been under assault at the end of the 20th century, and in many states there has been considerable decline in support for Extension in the past 25 years. The reason is quite simple and clear. The success of the agricultural research/extension establishment and the increased productive capacity of farmers made it possible to produce the nations food with ever fewer farmers. Indeed, as more successful farmers survive and less successful farmers go out of business, farm business size has grown and farm numbers have declined (USDA 1999, 10). In 1997 with 2.05 million farms, there are almost 400,000 fewer farms (16 percent decline) than there were in 1977. But the extension portfolio of programs has not followed suit. Indeed, during the same period the proportion of extension resources committed to agricultural programs has grown rather than shifting toward new clients, and new problems as figure 1 illustrates.
Table 1. National, state, and local extension
professional FTEs, by program areas, 1973, 1982, 1987 and 1992.a
|
|
Percent of Professional FTEs |
|||
|
|
1973 |
1982 |
1987 |
1992 |
|
Agriculture & Natural Resources |
38 |
44 |
46 |
47 |
|
Home Economics |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
|
4-H and Youth Development |
32 |
27 |
25 |
22 |
|
Community and Rural Develop. |
9 |
7 |
6 |
7 |
Source:
PDE-ES-USDA, May 11, 1992.
a More recent data was sought from CSREES/USDA to bring this table up to the late 1990’s. The USDA was unable to provide the data by these or any other categories that would permit an estimation of these categories and still sum to 100 percent of the FTEs.
Land-Grant universities like New Mexico State University have grown to become enormously diverse and complex institutions, vastly different than the Land-Grant Colleges of Agriculture they once were. While colleges of agriculture or their successors by whatever name they are known, still play an important role, there is much more than agriculture in the university that is of interest and impact to the people of the state that supports it. Notwithstanding the changes in the university and the profound changes in the society, the portfolio of extension at most of the Land-Grant universities at the end of the century more closely reflects the problems of the society during the Golden Age of agricultural research and extension in the middle of the 20th century than it does the society at the end of the century.
America, as she enters the 21st century, is a high technology society. Because the research universities are a major source of new knowledge in that society, and because there is an American ethic of “can do,” much of the new knowledge of the research universities that is useful will find its way into the hands of the American people, with or without outreach programs to facilitate its flow. But this suggests another, larger problem.
As our society becomes ever more complex, there emerge new problems to add to an unending list of unsolved problems of our people. Who will set the scholarly agenda and how do they know that it is valid and relevant, and relevant for whom? In general in the society, except for the broadest categories of science funding from the U.S. Congress, it is scientists who set the scientific scholarly agenda. It is called “peer review.” “The … ritual that gets in the way of good science is peer review…. The term ‘peer review’ in the context of science policy has acquired a deep symbolism within the science community. It is repeated like a mantra or used as a talisman to shield any activity, put it above reproach, so to speak (Shapley and Roy 1985, 102-3).” “Scientists are at the mercy of peer review systems that may offer neither “peers” nor “review”” (Chubin and Hackett 1990,194).
On the other hand, part of what has made for the high returns on investment of agricultural science and extension has been the focus of the research agenda. Just as the payoff to medical research is ultimately in terms of proof in clinical trials, the feedback from farmers through the extension system has helped to define where the cutting edge in agricultural science should be, and where the highest payoff would be.
The Land-Grant universities were better than Harvard, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford under the norms of 1862 America. Today they may be just as bad. Just like Harvard and Stanford, they sort through the youth of America to find those most likely to succeed and put their imprimatur or brand name on them. Today to their credit, the Land-Grant universities successfully compete with Harvard, Stanford and MIT for research grants, contracts, and the best students. But like the private institutions the Land-Grant universities have virtually no research agenda of their own that is directed to the people of their own state. There is little institutionalized and funded effort that feeds the problems of the society into the university. There are very few mechanisms that lay claim to the intellectual resources of the university, and that participate in setting the scholarly agenda, except the individual choice of scholars to search out public and private grant and contract funding sources. There is no institutionalized test of relevance or of workability of much of the science practiced at these institutions.
Returning to Our Roots: The Engaged Institution is the title of the report of the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities’ discussion of the role of state and Land-Grant universities in the society beyond their role in formal instruction. The Kellogg Commission is associated with the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC). To say that a “return to…roots” is necessary if the universities are to be engaged in the society and it’s multitudinous problems is harsh language about the current state of public university affairs. This from the Commission made up of presidents and chancellors of many of the leading public research universities in the country, and implicitly from all of them, by virtue of their association with NASULGC. The defining statement by the Kellogg Commission as a preface in the document states:
In the end, what the bill of particulars adds up to is a perception that, despite the resources and expertise available on our campuses, our institutions are not well organized to bring them to bear on local problems in a coherent way (Kellogg Commission 1998).
In commenting on the work of the Kellogg Commission, C. Peter Magrath, President of NASULGC summed up the dilemma of the Land-Grant universities at the end of the 20th Century:
Our universities, and therefore our society, face a crisis. Public universities must be financially stable and enjoy public confidence in order to perform their unique and vital mission as the intellectual and educational service centers for America in the 21st century. But to earn this support they must examine themselves, aided by friendly but not uncritical outside counsel--and then change and reform wherever needed to better serve society (Magrath 1996).”
In giving a mandate to the Kellogg Commission, it’s leadership, all eminent leaders of American higher education, included the following in their joint statement:
To state the case as succinctly as possible: We are convinced that unless our institutions respond to the challenges and opportunities before them they risk being consigned to a sort of academic Jurassic Parkof great historic interest, fascinating places to visit, but increasingly irrelevant in a world that has passed them by (Kellogg Presidents Commission 1996).
The extension system is a logical candidate to become the institutionalized mechanism for engagement of the Land-Grant universities with the people of the state--it has played that role in the past. However, in order for that to happen again into the 21st century there will need to be significant change and a re-negotiation of institutional commitments in the universities, in extension, in state legislatures, with established clients of extension, and with the people of the states. It will require new definitions of scholarship and a new epistemology of science. It is a new Frontier.
That original mission of the Land-Grant university is being renegotiated in some places and abandoned in others. In some places the renegotiating of the social contract is being lead by extension, and in some places extension is being left behind, in part because dealing with agricultural interest groups is simply too much trouble, given their growing inability to deliver in the political process. As the Land-Grant universities move into the 21st century, some of them will be Land-Grant universities by name and history only and some will again be people’s universities. Some will be “state supported” universities, some will be “state assisted” universities, and some will be “state located” universities. Extension can be part of the problem or part of the solution.
Earlier in this presentation it was asserted that with or without facilitation – with or without extension – useful new knowledge from the Land-Grant universities will find it’s way into use in the society. Actually, that is only partly true and true for only some kinds of knowledge. It is true for new knowledge that is science/technology based and particularly true for knowledge that can be patented or embodied in a commercial technology package.
The kinds of knowledge that will not be adopted or employed without educational assistance will be knowledge with respect to broader contexts of personal, professional, business or policy issues. This is particularly true of knowledge in the social and management sciences, and the humanities. It is also be true for some technical knowledge where that technology must be combined with management knowledge in order to be fully exploited. It is the difference between “can I successfully feed cattle?” and “can I successfully feed cattle under contract?”
The differences in the way that attributes of particular types of knowledge affect their dissemination and use is already having a profound effect on Land-Grant universities, colleges of agriculture, and extension. In the history of Land-Grant universities’ engagement with American agriculture the dominant contribution of the extension function was to provide the “clinical proof” of the efficacy of the science agenda and its relevancy. Also the clients that were assisted provided political support at the county, state and federal levels for the research/extension system. There has been throughout this history of the Land-Grant/US Department of Agriculture research/extension system a strong preoccupation with on-the-farm technology and its management – we have a preponderance of our resources addressing the question “can I successfully feed cattle.”. At my own institution we have between 75% - 80% of our extension specialist resources committed to that part of the agenda. The National Research Initiative similarly reflects very similar research priorities with respect to production technologies and their supporting science.
The importance of this on-the-farm orientation of the Land-Grant agricultural research and extension portfolio is that this is precisely the type of knowledge that is most likely to be commercialized by the private sector. With the changes intellectual property rights and the possibility of patenting plant and animal genetic material, those commercial farmers who remain in business will get their technology and instruction about it from commercial vendors, not from extension. There is already evidence from around the county that the technology needs of many commercial farmers are well beyond the capacity of an agricultural generalist in each county, and so extension struggles to figure out ways to enable its agricultural extension staff to specialize.
As the technology needs of commercial farming become increasingly sophisticated and commercialized, our agricultural extension agents will spend their time with the ‘farming-as-a-way-of-lifers.’ If not already happening, our agricultural agents will move towards acting almost entirely in a reactive way – almost as consultants rather than as educators – and our farming clients will cease being able to deliver the political support that the agricultural research and extension system requires.
Is there a knowledge niche for extension in agriculture, even in commercial agriculture, as agricultural technology becomes more commercialized? Notwithstanding our focus on the on-the-farm technology, we are increasingly aware that profitability in farming businesses has to do with much more than that. Profitability is profoundly affected by public policies at the federal, state and even local levels. Farming success for full- or part-timers has much to do with changes in the structure of the American food system that markets our food, and many more things beside what happens on farms growing the crops or raising the livestock. It has a great deal to do with strategic business behavior by farmers – the stuff that cannot much be done from the seat of a tractor. The arguments of Stephen Blank from California that commodity agriculture is no longer a viable sector in the American economic portfolio suggests that the issues are less technology than they are economics, management, and competing uses of land, water, and human resources.
The possibility that these circumstances of farming are true suggests that our agricultural science portfolio is distorted. It suggests that we are disproportionately investing in knowledge that will be taken away from our purview and that we are not investing in knowledge that farmers cannot get from the commercial sector. Consider the following:
1. Why has per capita beef consumption has fallen from 76 pounds in 1976 to about 65 pounds in 1995?
2. Are there agricultural scientists that think the answer to the above question is because home economists have not been doing a good enough job telling people they should eat more red meat?
3. Why does “CHOICE” have so little to do with beef cut quality?
4. Why is the fact that “CHOICE” has such little to do with beef cut quality not much reflected in production decisions in beef cattle?
5. Do judging standards in beef cattle that we teach 4-H ers have anything to do with meat quality?
6. Is it possible that the first two questions are related?
7. Is it possible that the first and 3rd questions are related?
8. Is it possible that the first and 4th questions are related?
9. Is it possible that the first and 5th questions are related?
10. Is it possible that we are giving farmers what they want in the way of information and not what they need? (What they want usually can be done from a tractor seat, and what they need, can’t!)
11. Are we losing farmers faster than we are losing agricultural scientists?
12. Is it possible that we have an excess capacity in our public agricultural knowledge and information system (AKIS)?
13. Is it possible that we have a distortion in the portfolio of our AKIS?
14. Are there distortions in the overall extension portfolio, just as there may be in the agricultural part of the portfolio?
15. Is it possible to build coalitions of new audiences that can help carry the agricultural part of extension?
16. What changes could/should be made to improve our portfolio of programs and of support in order to sustain extension, colleges of agriculture and home economics, and Land-Grant universities?
I don’t have answers to the above questions or the issues they suggest. Consider some of the experiences around the country that may be suggestive. I wish first to take up the agricultural extension program because that is the part of the program that is in greatest peril.
Agricultural extension getting its act together?
Almost anyone in agricultural extension in the country knows that we need to reorganize if we are going to in any way serve commercial agriculture. It has to do with more than just specialization but that is certainly part of the issue. We need teams of field staff associated with campus specialists who are not bound by county assignments. So I thought I would tell you about the effort at Cornell I heard about a couple of years ago. Cornell extension was seeking $10 million extra funding to finance specialist teams to serve commercial agriculture. They needed the additional funding because the politics of removing agricultural agents from existing county assignments and reorganizing was too tough. I called Cornell in preparation for this talk – they didn’t get the $10 millions and still don’t have the reorganization done.
I had heard that in Maryland they were hiring some “agricultural development” extension agents to deal less with production agriculture than with agriculture as a part of the local economy and local land use. I called Maryland extension – the rumors were false.
Penn State had told me directly that they had a similar “agricultural development” assignment being developed in Mercer County, my ancestral home. I called Penn State – they have not been able to pull it off though ”they are still committed to the idea.”
Under severe budget cuts, the University of Minnesota is now in the process of organizing its total extension program into teams of regional educators that have multiple county responsibilities and closer collaboration with campus faculty specialists. Existing county offices will be maintained and house various staff members of the teams but only 4-H extension assistants will have duties limited to the county where they are housed. The most important thing to the success of the regionalization of Minnesota’s extension programs will be the counties’ willingness to “buy” extension programs rather than buying particular extension staff members. The Minnesota Association of Counties has agreed to support the move in the face of the proposed budgets cuts.
The Minnesota agricultural extension program will have three major program areas:
Thus far the Minnesota planned reorganization is simply that – a plan. There is no track record.
About the only place I have been able to detect a significant program explicitly designed to serve commercial agriculture is at the University of Missouri. The Commercial Agriculture Program is a $2,000,000 line item in the University of Missouri System budget and operates as a special center or program on the Columbia campus. It is substantially independent of the general cooperative extension program but works collaboratively with extension campus faulty and field staff. It is almost 15 years old, employs 21 FTEs including a cadre of faculty specialists who are not on tenure track appointments. The CAP works primarily through focus teams, high level seminars and workshops, applied research and demonstrations, and electronic bulletin boards for specific issues. Its programs are delivered directly to clients with or without county staff participation.
At the University of Missouri the CAP is one of many centers that has enabled the university to operate with both tenure track and non-tenure track faculty and staff. Such centers represent a major university-wide strategy to make the resources of the university available to the people of Missouri. The creation of centers is part of the way to that the shackles are broken of some aspects of academic culture that get in the way of getting practical things done.
I conclude that the record of change in program delivery in agricultural extension programs is not promising. At Cornell they tried to raise an additional $10 million to get it done but failed. In Pennsylvania and Maryland they have tried to get some different types of agricultural programming done but have failed. In Missouri regular agricultural extension programming goes on as if the Commercial Agriculture Program doesn’t exist, though that program is quite promising. Agricultural extension in the country is in deep trouble. It is over invested in subject matter that is already being taken over by commercial interests and has under invested in the types of knowledge that commercial farmers really need. Agriculture extension is giving farmers what they want, not what they need, and there is no future in that.
Agricultural extension needs some political help to sustain it over the next several years so that it can get its act together. Who will carry water for the agricultural extension program so that the necessary changes can get done? The answer is clear! It will be mostly the folks who have carried it in recent years – the kids and the home gardeners. But the load is heavy – we need to broaden the total extension constituency. We also need the support from university leadership to recognize their broader responsibility to help the rest of the university to be engaged with the people of the state. So here we are at the questions of the total extension program and the role of extension in the total outreach of the whole university.
Because the issues of an extension program portfolio that engages the total university is really very complicated, let me use as a parable the idea of a history extension program. There could be several faculty members with 50% or more extension appointments in the department of history. They would work with community historical societies providing training on how to do oral histories, small museum management, state and federal laws and resources on historical preservation, and the historical and anthropological history of the state and its people, among other things. Some of the “other things” could include bring students to work on excavations in particular communities. The importance of such a program is, just as in agronomy, multifaceted. First, the people of the state who might never come to NMSU would gain a much better sense of their history. The NMSU students studying history would have a brand of history taught to them that is more relevant to their own New Mexico experience. And third, since the historical societies involve some of the most influential citizens in the community, a coalition of members of the historical society, the 4-Hers, the home gardeners, and the agricultural community will be more successful in bringing in extension and university budgets at the county and state levels.
Your history department already has a program in public history that is a natural lead to such an effort. All they need is a couple of half-time faculty appointments and some collaboration with folks in the College of Agriculture and Home Economics who know how to organize and deliver extension programs. Check out the National Endowment for the Humanities as a possible funding source.
At North Carolina State University there has been a Humanities Extension program since the 1970’s. Unfortunately, and to the shame of Cooperative Extension in North Carolina, the tow programs are unassociated. After developing programs to be delivered in the counties on such topics as First Amendment Freedoms, Charles Dickens, and The Small Town in American Literature, the College of Humanities and Social Science who sponsors the Humanities Extension Program discovered that teachers of social studies in the schools were hungry for their materials. This lead to offering teachers certification credit for attending extension programs and then to the preparation of materials for teachers use in the classroom. By the late 1990’s the program had embarked on a textbook writing project for social studies in the 4th to 7th grades. Because of the superior design of the textbooks and their complete compliance with standards for social studies in North Carolina, Macmillian/McGraw-Hill decided not to compete and obtained license to publish the books prepared by the History Extension Program. Under the license agreement, Humanities Extension receives 50% of grow sales up to $10 million and 40% above that amount. My last information on the program from over a year ago was that gross sales were well over $11 million.
In cooperative extension we have taught millions of kids to raise calves – we’ve always known more about the calves than the kids. In recent years we (extension) have started to move our 4-H curricula materials on calves, chicks, and all manner of other things into school classrooms. It’s actually called “running the numbers” on form ES 237 or its successor where we report ”unduplicative contacts” between extension and kids to the federal government. But couldn’t we follow the NC State Humanities Extension Program model and get the biology/zoology/animal science departments and any other departments that are appropriate to work on applied biological science curricula for elementary school children and their teachers? Maybe there is even a market for New Mexico specific elementary science textbooks. And let form ES 237 be damned and let 4-H get on with youth development.
To accomplish any of these last examples requires overcoming many institutional barriers within any Land-Grant university. Jim Clark, Professor of English Literature at NC State and Director of the Humanities Extension Program, started it because he went to college on a 4-H scholarship. After getting his PhD in American Literature from Duke University, he believed he owed NC State University and extension for their contribution to his own growth and development, and o the only place he wanted to work was at NC State. But even Jim Clark cannot break down the barriers between Cooperative Extension and the Humanities Extension Program. He says, “We are not at war, and do not even have argument. We simply do not live in the same house.”
Conclusion –
Pioneering a New Frontier
The lost potential for Land-Grant universities and particularly for extension around the country is that we really are in one house – the peoples’ university – but behave as though we are in different houses. There is lots of fault to go around. Carcasses of extension directors, deans, and even presidents who have tried to extend the roof of the house are all across the landscape. The problems are enormous! There is a totally different culture in much of the university that has not had an affiliation with the USDA/Land-Grant partnership and that is a real barrier. But the biggest barrier is getting the agricultural community, to whom we owe so much and who owes us so much, to learn that there is more to be gained by collaboration and broadening the portfolio.
Senior university leadership – the president and above – need to understand that extension has carried water for the total university, not just for itself. In the face of budget cuts, extension cannot raise tuition as can the instructional program, and broadening the portfolio is in the interest of the total university. They also need to understand that the hardest message for the people of the state to grasp is what a “research university” really is. The best way for the citizens of New Mexico and their representatives to learn how and why a research university is different is to have extension based on that research affect their lives. The agricultural community has understood that issue for a very long time.
Now, for the sake of the agricultural community and for the rest of the people of the state, extension needs to lead in the engagement of the total university with the people of New Mexico. That is really a new Frontier. Thank you!
References
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[1] Paper presented at the 2002 All College Conference, College of Agriculture and Home Economics, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM. January 3, 2002.
[2] Some of the snobbery associated with the aristocratic education persists. In the late 1980’s a soccer team from the University of Massachusetts was playing and beating Harvard’s team in Cambridge. In frustration at the beating they were taking, Harvard fans jeered the UMass fans with “you will work for us.” Personal conversation with a UMass fan present at the incident.