Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Agent of Democracy
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prevailing view. 20
Consider the following view of the land-grant mission that
was articulated by a professor in the natural science discipline of
plant breeding:
I would argue that the mission of the land-grant is
interaction with the people in the state. If we want to
contribute to the collective wisdom—and that includes
us as everyone else around the state—then I think it
means interacting with people, wrestling with people
to understand the issues that are being confronted and
figure out what our piece in that picture is. What can
we do to contribute to greater understanding or better
dialogue or public policy that really will help address
them? As a college that focuses on food, food science,
agricultural areas, environmental areas, that sort of
revolve around that, I think our piece of this is about
sustainable landscape design and management, and
thinking about how are the landscapes—urban, semiurban
and rural—in the state used, and how can we
make that something that is more sustainable, in the
most honest sense of that word. That’s what I think of
as the land-grant mission for our college, particularly
given the kinds of disciplines that we represent.
This view positions land-grant faculty as proactive participants
in public work: not as volunteers, but as scholars. It both
compels and authorizes scholars to establish reciprocal relationships
between the university and the public that hold both democratic and
academic promise. At their best, such relationships are not only
civic or political in nature, in the sense that they involve deliberation
and action about public issues. They are also scholarly, in the
sense that they serve as a crucial means of informing, shaping, and
sometimes even conducting a scholar’s research.
20 With respect to the role of serving as an ally in public making work, it is important
to note that there is a significant difference between providing ideas and
providing opportunities. The former can be done indirectly and at a distance, without
ever coming into relationship with a public. The latter is inherently direct and
face-to-face. The opportunities that support public making that land-grant colleges
of agriculture and human ecology provide through their institutionalized extension
and experiment station systems are a large part of what makes these colleges
distinctive.