Land-Grant Universities and Extension into the 21st
Century:
George R. McDowell
The Morrill Act was “the charter of America’s
quietest revolution”(Taylor 1981, 37). 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 focus on in reflecting on the establishment of these institutions.
Rather, the principle behind their establishment 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 the
people they would serve, the Land-Grant universities were established as people’s
universities. This commitment to all the people was the social contract!
It was a covenant with the people of America.
Prior to the 1862 Land-Grant
institutions, higher education was reserved for, and helped preserve, the
aristocracy. Being a university graduate was an imprimatur of high status
in the society. The Land-Grant universities opened classrooms to young people
whose previous experiences were primarily on farms, in machine shops, bakeries,
or factories. Liberty Hyde Bailey,
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 – attending college
has become commonplace. Today,
we expect all young Americans, who can qualify, to go to college. Many expect to go on to graduate school
at least for a Masters degree. Even
though other developed nations have emulated the United States investment
in higher education, during the period 1985-1991, the U.S. consistently reported
the highest enrollment for 18-21 year-olds in tertiary education of all developed
countries, with U.S. rates between 33 and 38 percent (Peri, et. al 1997).
An even more revolutionary
idea than widespread access to higher education was embedded in the establishment
and evolution of the Land-Grant universities. According to Taylor it was “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, including
America’s, were schooled in theology, the letters, law, and in some
few institutions patterned after German universities like Johns Hopkins University,
medicine. The Land-Grant view
of scholarship directly challenged the prevailing norms of scholarship by
making the work of cow barns, kitchens, coke ovens, and forges the subject
matter of their investigation (Eddy 1957). In 1890, the Babcock test for butterfat
content of milk was both a scientific advancement and a political/economic
act necessary to organize 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. Around 1900, by which time
agricultural scientists had demonstrated their ability to solve some of agriculture’s
practical problems, farmers clamored for access to the insights of the scientists.
The claims on scientists’ time became so great that the outreach
function of the university was formalized. The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 established
support to the Cooperative Extension Service and gave it a federal mandate. “Cooperative” referred to
the partnership between the federal, state, and county governments in support
of the extension program.
Smith-Lever provided for
federal government funding to the universities in support of the extension
outreach function, just as the Hatch Act of 1887 had funded agricultural research.
Rainsford's (1972) research makes clear that the Smith-Lever Act was passed
because the direct benefits to farming sought by agricultural interests in
their support of both the Morrill Act and the Hatch Act had not been forthcoming.
Most students in the Land-Grant colleges did not study agriculture
and go back to the farm, even though they came from farm families; the results
of research and instruction did not reach farmers because they were not in
college but on the farm.
Thus, the Land-Grant system was revolutionary in the
history of higher education in three ways:
1. its classrooms and degrees were accessible to the working
classes;
2.
its agenda of scholarship considered
no subject beneath its purview; and
3. it provided access to new knowledge to those who would
never qualify, nor want, to be in its classrooms.
And They Were Good!
This system that integrated research and extension has
been, and is, hugely successful. Agricultural productivity has grown enormously.
American farmers who have survived the economic tests of global markets
have prospered and have the most advanced means of production anywhere in
the world, though many who failed to keep business and technological pace
became obsolete. American society has continued to have
an affordable, safe, and secure food system. The agricultural knowledge and information system itself has
prospered with substantial support from both public and private sectors. The rate of return on investments in research
and development and extension in agriculture are somewhere between 20 and
40 percent per annum (Alston and Pardey 1996). Arguably, in a society whose
long-term cost of government borrowing has seldom, if ever, been as high as
15 percent, government should borrow at 15 percent and gain returns of 20
percent by investing in agricultural research and extension (Alston and Pardey
1996).
Evidence of the success of the system was made clear
by the period from 1920 to the end of World War II, the “Transition
to Science” era in American agriculture, according to Huffman and Evenson
(1993). It was during this period
that hybrid corn, among other science-based advances, was developed. However, the period of the 1950’s
and 1960’s was the Golden Age for the Land-Grant agricultural research
and extension system. By that
time, the system was enabling U.S. farmers and the agricultural sector to
successfully compete with producers anywhere in the world, as well as being
judged as one of the most productive sectors of the U.S. economy (Huffman
and Evenson, 1993).
I believe a large part of
this huge productivity derived from the engagement of campus-based science
with the realities of agricultural problems at the farm level through extension.
Busch and Lacy (1983) make clear in their Science, Agriculture and the
Politics of Agricultural Research,
that most of the choice of research projects by agricultural scientists at
that time was based on the personal preferences of the scientist. The only institutionalized link between
the agricultural sector and the university, then and now, is through the extension
function. Notwithstanding the low attention given to that activity by writers
on the economics of the system (Huffman and Evenson 1993, and Alston and Pardey
1996), the extension function is certainly a necessary if not sufficient condition
to the system’s success. Extension’s influence on the research agenda may go a
long way in explaining the high productivity of the system.
The early 21st
Century is a time when research universities, particularly public research
universities, are struggling to persuade the people of America of the unique
utility of such institutions, primarily in roles other than undergraduate
instruction. The public support
being sought is for both affirmation and funding. In that context, knowing that there was a time when the Cooperative
Extension Services of the several states as arms of the Land-Grant universities
were adjudged to be the most trusted source of new knowledge for ordinary
Americans is instructive (Feller, Madden, Moore, and Sims 1984). According to Miller, the Land-Grant universities
that served to create and transfer science-based technology into use by agricultural
producers is arguably ranked first of all the compelling scientific achievements
contributing to human development and welfare from the United States in the
20th century (McDowell, 2001).
Many in the Land-Grant system speak of the Land-Grant
mission – of teaching, research and extension – and allude to
it as having grown into something larger – a “Land-Grant principle.” When the principle is spoken
of it is usually in terms of the university doing something to help the society
or community that supports it. But as far as I can recall, I have never had
anyone explain in detail what the principle actually is. The current language
of “engagement” from the Kellogg Commission report, The Engaged
Institution (1998), further confuses
the discussion about the Land-Grant principle because the Kellogg document
asserts that engagement goes beyond extension and outreach that are described
as part of the Land-Grant mission. I propose to set forth here the essence
of the Land-Grant principle and to try to resolve its relationship to engagement.
Because the Land-Grant principle has to do intimately with scholarly
practice, it will first be necessary to discuss briefly how science is advanced
and then how that applies to the Land-Grant experience and to engagement.
What is Good Science?
There was a long debate during
the later half of the 20th century between philosophers of science
about how science is advanced. Two
more notable antagonists in the debate were Sir Karl Popper and Thomas S.
Kuhn (Blaug 1980). Both agreed
that science does not advance primarily by adding bits of insight to established
theory, but rather by direct challenges to accepted theory (falsification).
They disagreed however, about
whether any particular experiment might be a true test of a theory or when
it is a test of the skill of the scientist to create an experiment that would
indeed be an appropriate test. Popper argued that scientific practice that is anything less
than falsification is “hack science.” Kuhn argued that there is much to be learned and many “puzzles”
to be solved before one can put together a test of a theory.
This solving of puzzles – puzzles of measurement, instrumentation,
and many others – is the day-to-day stuff of scientific practice and
is not “hack science” according to Kuhn.
The solving of these puzzles is a necessary preparation to the direct
challenges to accepted theories.
Johnson and Zerby (1973) examined the issues of scholars
being involved in solving real life problems – not unlike Kuhn’s
puzzles – and how they deal with their own values in that process.
They argue it is impossible to solve practical problems without use
of theories. To keep values from getting in the way
in the use of a theory they proposed adhering to rules of objectivity. A concept is objective, they argue, if
it passes each of the following three tests:
Each of the three tests – consistency, clarity,
and workability – has further dimensions. There are issues of both internal and external consistency.
The appeal of mathematical modeling in many subjects is because it
assures internal consistency. However,
mathematical models may fail the test of external consistency. The test of clarity demands that the concept be clearly comprehendible
and communicable. The test of
workability comes from pragmatism and is primarily interested in the usefulness
of the theoretical insight to solving the particular problem.
The workability test is illustrated when a particular
theory or set of theories are employed in solving a problem. For example, there have been several theories
about the shape of the earth – one theory explains it as round, spinning,
and revolving around the sun. An
earlier theory explained it as a flat surface off of which sailors were fearful
they would fall if they sailed too far from the areas they knew.
If the problem to be solved is the construction of a house or bridge,
the flat earth theory is perfectly adequate and preferred.
In fact you better hope the contractor building your house is deeply
committed to it. Off level because, “hey the earth is round anyway,”
will not cut it. Pure empirical
observation can lead one to choose a southern exposure in siting a house for
the best passive solar heating in the northern hemisphere.
However, to explain those empirical results you will likely have to
abandon the flat earth assumptions.
By engaging in such problem solving activity, the skill
of the scientist is increased and may, in Kuhn’s terms, be more likely
to be able to set up the experiment that actually tests the theoretical hypothesis.
The test of objectivity that permits the scientist to work from her
discipline on the practical problem is the test of consistency. The test that permits an actual solution to be found to the
practical problem at hand is the pragmatic test of workability – light
moves in a straight line or is influenced by gravity depending on the application.
To restate the point: the exposure of the scientist and her theories to the
rigors of application in a practical problem (‘puzzle’ in Kuhn’s
terms) not of her choosing provides a clear test of the capacity and knowledge
of the scholar and perhaps also of the theory. This involvement in solving real problems
and the discipline it imposes on the scientist would certainly be consistent
with Kuhn’s notion of what is involved in making science better.
Research and extension scholars within the Land-Grant-based
agricultural science establishment were compelled to provide workable answers
to farmers’ practical problems. This process served to force the workability
test of scientific objectivity on the whole enterprise. Part of the way the
test of workability was imposed was through the debates and tension between
scholars with research appointments and those with extension responsibilities.
The institutionalized and funded engagement via the extension function
assured the continuing exposure of the science to the rigors of that test
of workability.
Is the Science Relevant?
Relevance to society of the science practiced is different
from the quality of scientific practice. Relevance has more to do with the scientific agenda and the
usefulness of the science in dealing with a societal problem. In general within contemporary universities,
the professors themselves establish the agenda of science. They establish the agenda on the basis
of where they can find funding, where they can get the work published, and
whether they are interested in the problem. Some argue that peer review is a significant part of setting
the scientific agenda – peers review both the proposals for funding
and the journal publications from the research that was funded. Others like Chubin and Hackett (1990)
in their Peerless Science argue
that peer review, involves neither peers nor review. Particularly in the funding process, peer review is in many
ways the old-boys network formalized.
A relationship between scholars and users of the knowledge
they produce helps to assure that the scholarly agenda is relevant to at least
those users, in addition to subjecting the scientist and science to the test
of workability, which may also make the science better.
The principle of scholarly behavior that evolved along
with the growth and development of the Land-Grant institutions as they struggled
to address the problems of American society at the later part of the 19th
century and throughout the 20th century can now be discerned. Partly
because of the character of the society and partly because agrarian interests
acted politically to establish the Land-Grant colleges, the early agenda was
directed to agriculture.
The Land –Grant Principle - Engagement
Synergistic power derives from scholarship practiced
where tests of workability and relevance are institutionalized. Further synergy
is generated when access to the knowledge is assured for users who will find
it useful in their lives. Some
of the power from this approach to scholarship and access to the knowledge
it produces is intellectual by virtue of the contribution to both the quality
and relevance of the scholarship practiced. Other power is political, resulting from the engagement with
users of the knowledge, the access they have to the scholarly product, and
the usefulness of the new knowledge to them. The impact of the synergism is
the power of engagement, and it is the Land-Grant principle.
This principle that emerged from the practice of agricultural
research and extension is general to all scholarship. Consider the new faculty member in child
development at the University of Wisconsin in the early-1990s who was given
a partial extension appointment. David
Riley’s interest was in pre-teen children and the impact that being
an unsupervised latch-key child might have on them. But after developing an extension series
of talks based on the best research available and taking it to county groups
he was being constantly told that what he had to say was not relevant to their
community – what he was telling about was more likely an urban phenomenon
they said. Finally, in frustration
Riley replied to one group that they should find out what really was the situation
in that rural county. With the
help of county extension staff Riley designed survey instruments for adults
and children and enlisted local citizens help to enumerate it.
The results were startling to the community and they began to listen
to Riley. In extension terms he had created a teachable
moment, but Riley had learned something too. New knowledge needs to be relevant as
well as good.
Against the advice of his
colleagues Riley who thought it academic suicide, Riley conducted the same
research again and again, in one community after another. Then he developed a method for communities
and county staff to use on their own. David Riley’s web page today says, “Dr. Riley has
helped over 80 communities conduct their own research on "latchkey children."
This has led to 92 new child care sites being started in the state.”
Stephen Small arrived at the University of Wisconsin
shortly after Riley, learned of Riley’s experience and employed it with
the special problems of teenage children.
The Teen Assessment Program (TAP ) is the result of Small’s similar
effort to that of Riley. When
I asked Stephen Small if the experience had made him a better scholar he said
that prior to the research in support of his extension efforts he had had
little interest in teenage sexuality. But that subject kept coming up in the survey results from
the kids. Today Small is one
of the leading authorities on that subject within his profession.
For convenience and to distinguish between the behavior
of individual scholars and the behavior of whole universities, engagement will be used to describe the action of individual scholars,
and the Land-Grant Principle will be used to describe the behavior of universities. University policies and structures used
to elicit or facilitate engaged scholarship from faculty are thus consistent
with the Land-Grant principle.
In the agricultural science experience, the power of
the Land-Grant principle translated itself into high productivity of the agricultural
knowledge and information system and into substantial funding support for
that system from federal, state, and local government. Classroom instruction can also be enhanced
by engagement through the greater relevance of both the instruction and instructor.
The method of instruction may also become a part of the engagement.
It is now appropriate to
make explicit the details of the way engagement and the Land-grant principle
operate at the level of extension programming and with extension staff. As
discussed in the previous section, the Land-Grant Principle is about the influence
of practical problem solving on the practice and relevance of scholarship
and the support that beneficiaries of the new knowledge provide.
The Land-Grant Principle is clearly a two-way street.
That notion of a mutual interest is more explicit in the language of
engagement currently in vogue. The
extension function is a significant part of the two-way street but extension
is not, in and of itself, engagement.
A part of the role of extension on the two-way
street turns on the definitions of scholarship. For much of the university community scholarship
is synonymous with research. Boyer
(1990) in his championing the role of professors in teaching argues that there
are four different kinds of scholarship – the scholarship of discovery,
the scholarship of integration, the scholarship application, and the scholarship
of teaching. Only a part of the research by campus faculty is the scholarship
of discovery but new knowledge comes from all of the categories. Field staff in extension may or may not
be involved in any of the Boyer categories of scholarship. Whether they behave as scholars depends
on whether they engage in formal written communication about their research,
integration, application or teaching using Boyer’s definitions.
Oregon State University uses a different
definition of scholarship than Boyer, though influenced by him, and makes
the communication among peers explicit.
The OSU faculty handbook asserts
Scholarship and creative activity are understood to be intellectual work whose significance is validated by peers and which is communicated. More specifically, such work in its diverse forms is based on a high level of professional expertise; must give evidence of originality; must be documented and validated as through peer review or critique; and must be communicated in appropriate ways so as to have impact on or significance for publics beyond the University, or for the discipline itself. Intellectual work in teaching is scholarship if it is shared with peers in journals, in formal presentations at professional meetings, or in comparable peer-evaluated forums. Scholarship and creative activity may take many forms, including but not limited to
|
For the most part, extension
field staff, whether or not they are called faculty, are educators. But they
are often not intimately involved in the generation of the new knowledge that
is continually needed, and much of their job does not require their being
scholars by any definition. However, as argued in the section above engagement
or the application of the Land-Grant principle is more than the generation
of new knowledge. Engagement
also demands that the scholars who generate new knowledge understand the character
of the problem to be addressed and its context in the life of people, communities,
and society. The Land-Grant Principle requires an institutionalized expectation
that scholars be responsive to demands from people, communities, and the society
in setting the research agenda and carrying it out.
That expectation is institutionalized (or not) in the rewards system
and culture of the university, and/or is institutionalized by giving some
members of the university community specific assignments to fulfill some aspects
of engagement. In the traditional Land-Grant colleges, the expectation for
engagement is funded through Cooperative Extension and extension fulfills
a number of the engagement elements that are beyond the scholarship itself.
In general extension educators
and extension programming carry out the following four functions:
Of these four functions,
extension educators work hardest on the third, providing functional education
to satisfy some need of a particular audience. In many cases the situational analysis is based on long time
experience with a particular audience and is accomplished almost intuitively.
The situational analysis (identifying people’s and communities’
problems) is often carried out in an informal way, notwithstanding all of
the efforts by staff development professionals to provide guidance to formalize
the Programming Development Process.
Access to the knowledge is either through initiatives that come from
university specialists or more often from the field educators own training
and knowledge. Sometimes it is the result of their own
scholarship and sometimes it is effective conveying the results of others
scholarship.
The function most neglected
by field staff is the effort to elicit from university specialists and researchers
truly new knowledge to solve a problem as yet unsolved or inadequately addressed.
Some field extension educators may defend themselves by asserting that
such effort is akin to hitting your head against a wall because it feels good
when you stop.
The part of extension work
least discussed but almost always implied, and constantly in the consciousness
of university and field staff, is the necessity for garnering support for
the system from those who have benefited from it. Examining the role and behavior of extension staff from this
perspective provides additional insights to extension’s role in the
engagement process and to the needs the system has to renew its covenant with
the American people.
To formalize thinking about
this aspect of engagement and the Land-Grant principle I suggest the following
are the necessary conditions to be able to earn and collect credit from audiences
of an extension program (McDowell).
These four conditions are not all under the control
of extension professionals but are considerations they must remember as they
design and develop programs. The
importance of the four conditions in program development is true whether one
is a state specialist or county educator.
The condition that extension educators in the field have the least
amount of control over is assuring there is a Positive Net Benefit because
they have less to do with the generation of the new knowledge. Rather, as discussed above, field educators
sort through the available knowledge using what in their judgment, is most
useful to the situation. Within that context they then work hard to design
programs that meet all the conditions set forth above. To fail to do so would be foolish.
One of the most effective ways to design programs to
satisfy these conditions is to particularize information so that it is, or
appears to be, absolutely specific to an individual client or group of clients.
Efforts so designed have the advantage of most easily meeting the attribution
and solicitation conditions. Soil tests and computer generated information
programs such as FINPAC or Gary Smith’s Northwest Income Indicators
Project, have this advantage. Business management programs especially designed
for dairy farmers, wheat growers or operators of hair dressing salons would
also have this advantage. Farm groups meet the solicitation condition relatively easily
because you always know where to find them--they have one foot tied to the
ground--when you want to collect political support from them. Perhaps that is why extension also helped
organized agricultural audiences into commodity or farm groups - so that we
could get information to them and collect from them, more easily. It is in
the attribution and solicitation attributes that 4-H clubs are so valuable
to us and 4-H in the classroom suffers in the very same ways.
One of the most common ways of particularizing knowledge
to specific members of an audience is in the one-on-one consultation –
in agricultural programming it is the farm visit. There are problems with
this type of delivery of information. It reinforces the Positive Net Benefit but confuses the Attribution
condition. When information is delivered one-on-one the client attributes
the information to the agent/specialist – by name – and not necessarily
to extension or the university as an institution. Some agents/specialists then use that
personal political credit to extract support for their particular part of
the program, rather than to grow the total program.
All four conditions are necessary and none is, in and
of itself, sufficient. However,
the first of the conditions, the Positive Net Benefit condition, is most important
because without it none of the others operate. It is the one most closely associated
with the new knowledge scholarship side of the Land-Grant principle. The message
from that condition is that our programs really must be built on knowledge
that audiences value. It also
implies that if our programs are not built on sound scholarship there is a
limited amount of support we can expect from audiences. This expansion of the Positive Net Benefit
condition has implications for the relationship between campus departments
and field operations.
Table 1. Wisconsin Program Areas and Campus/Field
Splits Based on Staffing by FTEs, Fiscal Year 1998.
|
Program Area: |
FTE % of Program |
Field % of Area FTEs |
Campus % of Area FTEs |
Campus % of CES FTEs |
|
4-H & Youth Develop |
15 |
76 |
24 |
<4 |
|
Family Living Ed |
27 |
82 |
18 |
<5 |
|
CNRED |
20 |
48 |
52 |
10 |
|
Agriculture |
28 |
39 |
61 |
17 |
|
Program Support |
5 |
|
|
|
|
Administration |
5 |
|
|
|
Consider Table 1 that shows the character of the campus-based
support to the respective program areas in Wisconsin extension in 1998.
Clearly, none of the programs come close to the agricultural program
in terms of investment in campus specialists and their supporting scholarship.
In fact, even the extension commitment in support of the agricultural program
understates the supporting investment because it excludes the research investments.
If these FTE measures are even a rough proxy or indicator of the scholarly
investment in knowledge base for the respective program areas and if Wisconsin
is not much different than other states, then it should not be surprising
that in most states the agricultural program is dominant. The agricultural
program has more to trade for client support.
It is not that farmers are more appreciative – they simply get
more.
After the discussion of the
way that extension operates we can now identify the extension roles in engagement
and the Land-Grant principle.
That these roles within engagement
look remarkably like the functions of extension discussed earlier is no coincidence.
The knowledge and skills that come from these roles is what Extension brings
to the engagement/Land-Grant principle table. The roles and the skills in their practice,
are not, in and of themselves, engagement! However, no engagement takes place without these roles being
fulfilled, though not necessarily by extension staff! Such are the ways of the two-way street implicit in engagement
and the Land-Grant principle. These are also the roles that extension can
play within a Land-Grant university as it seeks to persuade the people of
its state that a research university is worthy of their support.
The power of the Land-Grant
principle has been substantially lost in America’s Land-Grant universities
today, though there are within them many people practicing engaged scholarship.
The Kellogg Commission said it best when they titled their reports
“Returning to Our Roots . . .“ That title is tough language and
could not be more explicit about the universities being somewhere they ought
not be and the need for them to change.
While I do not understand all of the why’s about how these institutions
lost their way, I have some ideas I would share.
When these institutions started there was great coherence
between their mission and that of their federal partner, the USDA.
They were to serve a primarily agrarian society and, through the synergism
of the Land-Grant principle, they did. The federal partner’s mission
continues today to be assurance of an abundant, safe, and secure food supply. That has not much changed from the early
days. However, the Land-Grant
universities’ missions changed dramatically as the society changed.
America rapidly moved beyond farming as the primary
occupation. Today, the economies
of even most rural communities are not agricultural and less than 2 percent
of our people are engaged in farming.
As the society changed the Land-Grant universities expanded and broadened
the offerings to the growing numbers of students wanting to attend. While
the universities expanded into the many different colleges and disciplines
now in evidence, the extension agenda changed little, and neither the academic
culture of the Land-Grant principle nor access to the formula funding was
effectively shared.
The expansion of these Land-Grant universities into
some of the largest and finest universities in the world, of necessity drew
on academics trained within the private classical universities. With those scholars came representation
in the scholarly societies with no engagement traditions and their influence
on approaches to scholarship. Indeed, some of the faculty members without
Land-Grant backgrounds were embarrassed by the “cow college” images
associated with the agricultural science that was so dominant on the campuses.
Those same classically trained staff brought with them definitions
of excellence in scholarship that were primarily in terms of “normal
science” or logical positivism, the position of Sir Karl Popper, referred
to above. What agricultural scientists practiced would have been called “hack
science” by Popper.
Because this disassociated view of scholarship became
the dominant coin of the academic realm, it even spread into many of the disciplines
within the traditional colleges involved in the original Land-Grant covenant
with the American people. It is the ethic that makes publishing for peers
more important than publishing for users. This was the first capturing of the Land-Grant universities.
This capturing of scholarly philosophy partly explains the different
cultures on the campus reflected in 12-month verses 9-month faculty appointments. The same philosophy and its dominance
also explains the reticence by many within the traditional Land-Grant units
to get much involved in extension.
A second capturing of the university has taken place
more recently and whether the two are related can only be speculation. Because scholarship in any field is expensive,
because the states have not provided from public funds the amounts necessary
to sustain the research conducted at the Land-Grant universities, because
much of the federal funding of research is via competitive grants, and because
the results of much research has value in the private sector if it can capture
control of the findings, all universities are in a mad scramble for funds
from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and
private corporate funding. Publish
or perish is passé and is replaced by patent or perish for many faculty
members in some disciplines. Of particular concern is the selling of whole
departments research output to single corporations like University of California-Berkley
did with Navartis a Swiss biotech firm.
In an March 2000 Atlantic Monthly article, “The
Kept University,” Press and Washburn say today that America’s
research universities are more the universities of corporate America (Press
and Washburn, 2000) than the people’s universities. The concerns about the captured academy are concerns about
to whom the science will be relevant.
Resurrecting the notion that what is good for General Motors is good
for America does not make the grade by way of saying that the universities
are responsive to American’s interests in commercial products. Good for General Motors being good for
America was rejected many years ago and needs to be rejected again as Land-Grant
universities seek to renew the covenant.
In the earlier contract with the American people from
which emerged the Land-Grant principle, the workability test was important
and helped to generate the synergism that helped build these fine institutions.
That test demanded that the scientist be aware and concerned about the beneficiaries
of the scientific advances. The problem with logical positivism as the norm
of science is that the scientist does not care who pays the bills or benefits
from his efforts beside himself in either fame, fortune, or both.
This is the final breach of the covenant with the American
people and it is from both of these hostage takings that the Land-Grant universities
must “return to their roots.”
The reneging by Land-Grant
universities on the social contract with the American people does not all
fall at the feet of extension, but extension has done little to correct the
situation and has exacerbated it. Because
the covenant is not with extension but with the total university, extension
on its own cannot return the Land-Grant university to its roots or renew the
covenant. However, extension
does need to fix its own part of the problem and participate with the university
in fixing the rest.
The roles of extension in
engagement and the Land-Grant principle identified above and effectively played
by extension in the past have fallen on hard times. Extension throughout the
country has been insufficient in these roles in several ways.
Extension’s portfolio
of programs has been too narrow to effectively serve very many of the communities
of the state, whether they are communities are of place or of interest. We
have either not known well enough the problems of the communities or we have
not initiated scholarship and educational programs to serve them. Part of
the key to changing the makeup of our portfolio is making sure that the political
forces of any single community of interest does not dominate the internal
management of our resources. To that end, make sure that your county extension
advisory committee is representative of the total community and that term
limits are in place and enforced. Lest
you think that advisory committees are only a pain and too much work for the
payoff, the character of the Wisconsin program portfolio, the most diversified
in the country, is directly related to the power of their county Extension
Committees.
Even in many of the programs
we have had for a long time there is great room for improvement in obtaining
the supporting research. The lack of needed knowledge in extension programs
is partial evidence that extension relationships with campus departments and
scholars needs to be improved. The job of improving the field/campus connection
is not just a task for administrators or even best accomplished by them unless
they are prepared to make drastic changes like assigning all field faculty
to an academic department, as Oregon State has done.
The lack of a research base,
or a limited base, is true in parts of the agricultural extension program
but perhaps most egregious in some of the other program areas. In agriculture
we really only attended much to organic gardening/farming interests after
federal monies were forthcoming for sustainable agriculture in 1994. I’m pleased to see a commitment
to that effort in the Washington State University College of Agriculture and
Home Economics strategic plan – we cannot afford to keep science away
from any agricultural producers nor refuse them a place at the table at which
we set our research and extension agenda. Besides, many in the organic community
could use more than a bit of science.
The 4-H program is probably
the least engaged of our extension programs because very little sustained
research supports that effort. We have taught millions of kids to raise calves,
and we have always known more about the calves than the kids. After the Columbine Colorado High School
shootings, it was a Cornell faculty member with an extension appointment who
was called upon by the press to explain the antisocial behavior of alienated
youth. Unfortunately, most of
the rest of our youth programming people around the country had no basis for
an informed response to that tragic event and others like it. We need to learn
from the experience of Riley and Small in Wisconsin and get into the youth
development business based on research on local issues.
Another area of great social
importance and considerable extension effort that is under-supported by research
is the EFNEP program. Sustained
research on eating habits and other sociological/psychological aspects of
eating and diet are almost non-existent. Obesity is a major social and medical
problem in our society. EFNEP is 33 years old and still a “special program.”
That means it is somehow not entitled to the same claims on university and
extension resources and attention as other programs.
This role of informing the
on-the-campus-university and gaining their attention and support is tough
for field staff to accomplish. Such things as snobbish and arrogant faculty
who can’t believe they can learn anything from a field person with less
than a PhD confound the task. And then if you persist, you will still have
great difficulty getting campus faculty to respond, particularly if they have
no extension appointment. It
means you have to learn how to press their buttons, which often means dollars.
Whenever you get a grant, try to get a campus faculty member involved.
Asserting your claims on
the campus faculty also means you have to out-politic them within university
and state politics. Make sure that university leadership above the Director
of Extension understand that the politics of the university includes county
politics. Get leadership folks
to come to your county to visit and speak.
Having the university president speak in counties across the state
may have as much influence on changing campus rewards for involvement in extension
as anything you can do.
In general in extension we
are not diligent enough in garnering support from our audiences. We don’t even do it well for some
audiences who are already well served and would be willing to give their support
for sustaining the university and its programs. Sometimes support for the system is lost
because the support available is garnered on behalf of an individual agent
or specialist who then turns it into a bargaining chip for resources within
the organization rather than to grow the total effort. Other times we simply are not sufficiently creative in providing
the means for folks who are well served to make their views known.
These problems are all within
the part of the university from which the Land-Grant principle emerged and
where the culture is most amenable to encouraging and rewarding engaged scholarship.
Despite this tradition, the major extension problem throughout the country
is eliciting the supporting research for extension programming.
If getting support for extension
is tough within our traditional colleges, what of the problems of engagement
as you embark upon university wide Extension and deal with other parts of
the university where the culture is different? Washington State University leadership
has debated the decision about university-wide extension for over 40 years.
Now the decision is made! But it will be as much up to field staff
as to campus leadership to make it work. Drag them from the campus kicking and screaming and show them
how much fun it is to truly affect people’s lives. And don’t forget the humanities.
Give history a try with your local historical societies.
Many in Land-Grant universities
do not understand that the Land-Grant principle and engagement means affecting
the practice of those most involved in discovering new knowledge.
Engagement cannot be assigned to extension or to some outreach unit.
But you in the field are critical to making the Land-Grant principle work
again. You can’t renew the covenant by
yourselves, but they can’t renew the covenant without your guidance
and help.
Make it work! Break a leg!
References:
Alston, Julian M. and Philip G. Pardey. 1996. Making
Science Pay: The Economics of Agricultural R&D Policy. Washington, DC: The AEI Press.
Blaug, Mark. 1980. The Methodology of Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Busch, Lawrence, and William B. Lacy. 1983. Science,
Agriculture, and the Politics of Research. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.
Chubin, Daryl E. and Edward J. Hackett.
1990. Peerless Science. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Eddy, Edward Danforth, Jr. 1957. Colleges for Our
Land and Time: The Land-Grant Idea in American Education. New York, Harper & Brothers.
Feller, I, L, Kaltreider, P. Madden, D. Moore, and L.
Sims. 1984. Overall Study Report: Findings and Recommendations Vol. 5, The
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McDowell, George R., 1985. “The Political Economy of Extension Program Design:
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Oregon State University, 2002, Faculty Handbook. September
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Peters, Scott Joseph, 1998. Extension Work as Public
Work: Reconsidering Extension’s Civic Mission. Ph.D. Dissertation, University
of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Perie, Marianne, et al. 1997. International Education
Indicators: A Time Series Perspective. Washington, DC: National Center for Educational Statistics,
U.S. Department of Education.
Press, Eyal and Jennifer Washburn, 2000. “The
Kept University.” The Atlantic Monthly, March 2000.
Rainsford, George N. 1972. Congress and Higher Education
in the Nineteenth Century, Knoxville,
Tennessee: The University of Tennessee Press.
Riley, David. 2002. http://wiscinfo.doit.wisc.edu/hdfs/faculty/riley.html. September 23, 2002.
Taylor, John F. A. 1981. The Public Commission of
the University. New York, New York:
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[1] Papered prepared for Washington State University Cooperative Extension Conference 2002, Pullman, WA October 14-16, 2002.