Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Agent of Democracy
and rural communities, but it also wracked serious cultural and
environmental damage. 17
“Community members
were often skeptical of professional
research findings,
for the good reason that
they often did not reflect
local experience.”
(“Public Scholarship and
the Land-Grant Idea,”
HEX, 1997.)
While the historical tradition
of public scholarship in the agricultural
experiment station and
extension work of the land-grant
system included practitioners who
sought to “direct and aid” in the
task of developing a new rural
civilization through an oppressive
technocratic politics, it also
included practitioners who took
up this task through productive,
developmental, participatory, and
democratic varieties of civic republican
and populist politics. For those who embraced a democratic
rather than technocratic politics—including Liberty Hyde
Bailey, Kenyon Butterfield, Mary Mims, and many others—the
task was not to develop a rural civilization that would fuel an industrial
economy with cheap food. Nor was it restricted to the de-
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17 For the oppressive technocratic story about the land-grant system, see J. Hightower,
Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company,
1973-1978); C. E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social
Thought (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976/1997); W.
Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 3rd edition (San Francisco,
CA: Sierra Club Books, 1977/1996); D. D. Danbom, The Resisted Revolution:
Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900-1930 (Ames, IA: Iowa
State University Press, 1979); A. I. Marcus, Agricultural Science and the Quest for
Legitimacy: Farmers, Agricultural Colleges, and Experiment Stations, 1870-1890
(Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1985); K. Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm
Women and Technology, 1913-1963 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina
Press, 1993); M. Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and
the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940 (Baltimore, MD: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); H. S. Barron, Mixed Harvest: The Second
Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870-1930 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University
of North Carolina Press, 1997); R. R. Kline, Consumers in the Country: Technology
and Social Change in Rural America (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000); and D. Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial
Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).