Land Grant Mission Research Articles

What are animal science departments doing to address contemporary issues?

Animal science departments are principle progenitors and disseminators of scientific information relating to the production of agricultural animals and their food products. The Land-Grant university missions of teaching, research, and extension are conduits designed to advance and enhance scientific knowledge within agriculture and to make this knowledge available to the public. I conducted an electronic survey to determine whether animal science departments are addressing contemporary issues through the traditional missions of the Land-Grant university system, which issues they are addressing, and how they are addressing these issues. Sixty-three animal science department administrative heads (AH) were contacted through an E-mail listserve maintained through Michigan State University. An introductory letter described the goals of the survey and asked the AH to submit contact information for faculty coordinators of teaching, research, and extension within their departments. Forty-nine percent of the administrative heads responded and submitted contact information for 72 faculty members. Survey questions were sent to the identified faculty. The total survey return was 38.9%, 37.7% of the respondents answered questions for teaching, 31.1% for research, and 31.1% for extension. Animal waste, animal welfare, and food safety are examples of issues where all three missions have concentrated efforts. However, graduate student education on issues was identified as lacking emphasis. Animal science departments are responding to contemporary issues in all three of the Land-Grant mission components.

The culture of distance education: Implementing an online graduate level course in audience analysis

This essay details the experience of designing, implementing, and evaluating an online course in audience analysis at the graduate level. Through a discussion of the culture of this online course, I describe how the educational culture of the Land Grant Mission flowed into our efforts to create a quality learning experience, and how the Web modules and asynchronous (listserv) and synchronous (MOO) conversations influenced communication and learning.

Opportunities and Challenges in Cooperative Extension for Agricultural Economists

Though there are many challenges facing extension economists, there are significant opportunities to serve rural America and fully participate in our profession. National studies have reconfirmed extension as an integral part of our land grant mission, and a survey of chairs of departments of agricultural and resource economics shows that 87% indicate that there is increased or constant pressure by the public for programing by extension economists. Retirement estimates provided by chairs suggest it is likely that at least one-half of new faculty hired over the next five years will have extension appointments. Perhaps most importantly, there are critical societal issues to which extension economists can make valuable contributions.

Objective Measures of Ph.D. Program Quality in Agricultural Economics

Graduate student education is an important component of the educational and research mission for agricultural economics departments across the country. A high-quality graduate program brings prestige to a department and attracts high-quality faculty and students that are invaluable in helping a department carry out its land grant mission. On the other hand, a troubled graduate program can hurt a department's reputation, demoralize faculty, and monopolize the time of departmental administrators. Assessing the quality of graduate programs is difficult because graduate education has many facets. Such factors as mentoring by faculty, classroom instruction, faculty competence, educational objectives, research opportunities, physical facilities, and student quality are all important in determining the quality of education a graduate student receives. Even the relative importance of these factors will differ across students. For example, some students will experience a great deal of educational growth when given the opportunity to conduct journal quality research, while others may find such research experiences to be of little value. A number of researchers have attempted to assess graduate and departmental programs using a few key measures. Publishing output by doctoral students graduating between 1971 and 1982 was used by Tauer and Tauer to rank doctoral programs. Although this type of measure has great appeal, it is of limited value in ranking current graduate programs. Faculty changes or a different administrative philosophy can cause a marked change in graduate program quality over a rela ively short time period. Research output is more often used as a measure of departmental quality. The two approaches utilized are publication counts (Holland and Redman; Opaluch and Just) and citation counts (Gregory and Adams; Beilock, Polopolus, and Correal). Publication counts are useful in assessing the professional activity and competence of departmental faculty. Citation counts help in assessing the long-term impact of this professional activity. To use these measures in assessing graduate program quality, one must assume that these highly-productive faculty have the ability to teach their publishing skills and field expertise to other students in both classroom a d mentoring situations. Typically, these publication counts are limited to a few journals, mainly those aimed at academic economists and agricultural economists. Thus, these counts miss much of a department's output. In the case of citation counts, a few highly-cited pieces of research done 20 years ago may lead one to believe that a particular faculty member is currently competent to teach and mentor graduate students. A third approach is to survey agricultural economists and obtain a subjective assessment of graduate program quality (Boddy; Perry). The advantage of this approach is that it measures perceptions of quality, which are important in influencing where students decide to pursue graduate studies. The disadvantage of this approach is that little timely information exists on the current status of graduate education in particular departments. Therefore, faculty largely rely on anecdotal evidence and historical performance to assess current program quality. The objective of this article is to provide agricultural economists with a more comprehen-sive set of information about U.S. Ph.D. graduate Gregory M. Perry is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, O egon State University. Technical Paper #10792 of the Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station. The author wishes to express appreciation to those who provided information for this study and the comments expressed during faculty seminars at Texas A&M and Oregon State. Comments by reviewers were also responsib e for improving and clarifying the interpretation of results.

Land-Grant Organization to Meet the Future

James E. Martin shortcomings were common to higher educaI am pleased for this opportunity to renew tion when the land-grant colleges were estabfriendships with many of my former collished, and universities are not immune to leagues in the field of agricultural economics them today. Thus, administrators and faculty here today. My topic probably has as much have to be especially wary to avoid irrelpersonal interest as professional interest for evance and parochialism of their institutions. those of you who are at land-grant instituLand-grant institutions require an effective tions-I assume that would cover most of the administrative and academic structure to audience. At any given time, an academic inaccomplish their three-fold mission of instrucstitution is probably either changing its tion, research, and extension. Society cannot organization or contemplating a change. As afford for these institutions to produce members of land-grant institutions, we are graduates who are ill-prepared to be producpersonally affected by the changes made, and tive citizens. Therefore, the quality and conour professional interests are frequently protent of academic offerings should be subjected voked by the effects of these changes on the to frequent review. traditional land-grant constituencies. These institutions are also the source of The land-grant concept is just as valid today many of the nation's most valuable research as in 1862, when the Morrill Act made higher efforts; thus, research programs designed to education available to a broad spectrum of generate new information applicable to busisociety-but neither society nor the landness, industry, agriculture, and individual grant institutions are the same today as they citizens need attention. were in the 19th century. Land-grant instituThe extension role also deserves emphasis -tions have changed the nature of higher to remove the walls that academic profes-education in this country, and they remain sionals tend to build around college campuses. important in today's information society. Extension is often the initial contact between After 1862, higher education was no longer academic institutions and the general public; limited to the few and the privileged. It it is both unique and critical to the success of became available, in the words of the Morrill the land-grant mission. Act, to the industrial classes in the several There will never be an ideal administrative pursuits and professions of life. Land-grant structure for academic institutions, so univercolleges were established with the mandate to sity administrators look for the best system educate the general public instead of a few. for their institutions at a given time. People Over the years, as the needs of society are always the first consideration for an adchanged, the methods used to meet those ministration structure. Good people can overneeds have also changed. come a flawed organization, but a perfect plan Land-grant colleges and universities today on paper cannot overcome the weaknesses of are trying to overcome two obstacles that poor administrators. A strong administrator point to the need for constant review and needs to be in charge of any reorganization periodic reorganization. First, they must attempt, and that administrator should be as avoid the danger of becoming locked into a high within the existing organizational strucbureaucratic administrative structure that is ture as possible. Preferably, that individual not relevant to education in a rapidly changing should report directly to the president, and he society. The second danger is that their or she should be someone of the president's academic structure could become too interchoosing. nalized, ignoring the needs of society. Such Properly managed, an institution can be

A Century of Science in Agriculture: Lessons for Science Policy

Today all of science seems to be in some political and policy difficulty. There is rising conflict over the funding for and the performance of science. In the agricultural sciences there has been a crescendo of external criticism in Congress and elsewhere ever since the National Academy of Sciences Pound Report in 1972 (National Academy of Sciences). Repeated criticisms from the national science establishment suggest that agricultural science lacks a basic science foundation and is a thirdrate enterprise. Their usual prescription for this problem is quite simplistic: eliminate all the politically allocated Hatch-type formula funding, substituting for it peer-reviewed competitive grants-open to researchers anywhere, not just in colleges of agriculture. Various advocacy groups, the media, and some politicians are also highly critical of the agricultural sciences. They focus on such dangers as uncontrolled new genetic technologies and the threats to health, safety, and the environment of other agricultural technologies. The public attitude toward science has shifted from unqualified support to a questioning ambivalence and even fear of its consequences. At the same time some state legislatures perceive their land grant colleges to have abandoned the land grant mission and agricultural problem solving for the glories of basic science. These land grant colleges of agriculture are in difficulty with their clientele and legislatures. Still other colleges of agriculture have become so applied and isolated from many of the basic disciplines that they are losing scientific and intellectual vitality. After resisting the idea for over a decade, agricultural science now shows some sign of understanding it must adjust its mission and adapt its institutions to a society and an agriculture greatly different from that of fifty or even twenty-five years ago. It would appear that the national science establishment is also slowly beginning to understand that it too faces some fundamental questions. Since World War II public sector national science policy, except in medicine and agriculture, has been focused only on the basic disciplines. Applied science and technology, when considered, is treated separately as primarily a private sector matter of industrial research and development (RD how such a diverse scientific enterprise should be institutionalized, funded, and managed; what role the private sector should play; and, indeed, what philosophic values should inform the prioritysetting process. The debate, however, is poorly informed and inflamed by parochial Fellows address.

An Approach to Solving World Food Problems

Approaches to solving food problems have often been too specific, both here at home and abroad. In developing countries, chronic food problems have often been attacked with a technology, the adoption-diffusion of which, if nonappropriate to mores and customs of the people, has in the long-run been counter-productive. Through the World Food Institute at Iowa State University, we propose to identify problems, analyze them, bring competencies to bear on solving them, provide a continuing feed-in of educated, competent people geared to a problem-solving, interdisciplinary attack, and study the interrelationships to Iowa and the United States. We propose a continuing thrust from our University utilizing pertinent components of the land-grant mission which permitted problems to be solved in Iowa. Through this outward thrust in the broader, international scale, we hope to improve the nutrition and hope for hunger avoidance of humans elsewhere, and simultaneously thereby to increase our own understanding. We look to the peaceful interchange of food-related knowledge which, in the ultimate, knows neither borders nor political leanings.