Perspective from the Academic Community

Abstract

Members of departments of agricultural economics are rightly concerned as to how their graduates perform as they accept diverse responsibilities in a multitude of careers. This concern about employers' opinions of our students has undoubtedly precipitated numerous, perhaps continuous review of departmental course offerings and requirements, consuming significant energies of both educators and employers. To neglect this effort would leave a department-our profession-in the stagnant waters of nonrelevancy. However, I suspect that in many of these curriculum reviews considerable time is devoted to defining the academic qualities an agricultural economist should possess and what functions he should be able to perform in various types of employment-firm, farm, or public agency. Employers have worked with these curriculum study groups to suggest profiles of training. Often the results of such studies could politely be termed excursions in frustration, as opposing visions of the true role of academia often find precious little upon which to agree. Those agricultural economists concerned with the functioning of our graduates tend to mentally associate themselves with two philosophical camps-the specific and the general. I suggest that the profession align itself with a different vision of its proper role in society which more accurately expresses what agricultural economists do best-systems analysis. As I will explain, employers as well as some members of our profession, are at times uneasy in the presence of systems people. If you can temporarily accept a working hypothesis that agricultural economists should neither be specialists nor generalists, I will now try to justify my heretofore implicit position: agricultural economists are illprepared to function either as technocrats or as global planners, yet are ideally suited for employment as applied systems-trained problem solvers. I believe agricultural economists are most comfortable sitting between the extreme positions of specialists and generalists. When an employer hires a technocrat, a specifically trained individual like a lawyer, accountant, civil engineer, plant or animal breeder, the individual is assumed to be able to perform his or her specialized duties with an absolute minimum of acclimatization. A remark from a