Explaining Corporate Sponsorship on a ‘Land-Grant’ University

GOOD magazine published a piece on my alma mater, the University of Minnesota, by Claire Stanford on the worth of a land-grant university. Though the piece was clearly written from a food justice perspective, a general point of view I can get behind, Stanford seems to have some gaping holes in her analysis of higher education.

Stanford is a fiction writer from Brooklyn, something I will do my best not to begrudge her, who takes classes in the English department at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. She takes a bus to a farm class each week two days a week on the St. Paul campus.

But Stanford has issues with the U of M:

The University of Minnesota is a land-grant university, a term I was vaguely familiar with before coming here, but only insofar as I knew it meant something, well, farm-y. In my experience in agriculture classes, we haven’t specifically talked about what it means to be a land-grant institution, but the concept underlies everything that we do. After all, the class I am currently taking wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t part of a land-grant university.

[…]

Almost 150 years after the original act, what do we consider the evolving mandate of a land-grant school? Where do the ideas of organic, local, and sustainable agriculture fit into the land-grant system? And, most importantly, in this age of agribusiness, when I walk by the Cargill Building on my way to class, how is big money affecting both the curriculum and research at land-grant institutions?

Critics of the system, including sustainable agriculture luminary Wendell Berry, say that land-grant schools have departed too far from their mandate, emphasizing research to the detriment of teaching and land stewardship. What's more, when big agribusiness companies like Monsanto and Cargill are supplying grant money and donations to those same land-grant schools, there is the question of how objective that research can be.

Though training farmers might have been the original purpose of the “land-grant university” in Minnesota, its modern mission has certainly expanded beyond this rather narrow goal. Modern universities like the U of M that began as land-grant schools tend to serve the purpose of providing an affordable and quality education to the residents of the state, improve innovation and retention among the state’s population, and conduct academic research that contributes scholarship to various fields.

Such a mission is extremely expensive, especially when you have a large undergraduate population like the University of Minnesota does. Its total enrollment (including its various graduate schools) was 65,000 in 2009.

But despite its sizable student population, the state of Minnesota has been cutting back on the line item of state university systems since I was an undergraduate, beginning in 2002. State universities are generally the first to absorb budget cuts and the last to receive boots in funding.

Each year as an undergraduate, students would balk at stories of the school’s administration deciding to implement a “double digit” tuition increases. One way for schools to offset budget cuts that cuts into the pockets of students less is to raise money from wealthy alumni and corporate sponsors. On the school’s agriculture campus, it makes sense that they would try to raise money from large corporate agriculture businesses. (Offering to put someone’s name on a building is often a far more effective fundraising tactic than asking them to subsidies other, more needed aspects of higher education.)

That doesn’t justify the mix of corporate agriculture funds with higher education, but it does help explain it. And such sponsorship isn’t relegated to the St. Paul campus or agribusiness. The business school, for instance, holds classes in the “Carlson School of Management” building. The Golden Gophers football team plays in the “TCF Bank Stadium.” It's important not to look at these issues in isolation. Corporate influence in agriculture, after all, is tied to state and federal funding for universities.

Meanwhile, Stanford also questions the place of local, organic, and sustainable agriculture in the University of Minnesota system. That’s an excellent question, and one that I wished she’d actually reported out. It seems that the U of M’s course catalog offers several classes in this realm, including “Environment, Global Food Production, and the Citizen,” “Renewable Energy and the Environment,” “Student Organic Farm Planning, Growing, and Marketing,” and “Issues in Sustainable Agriculture.” I reached out to the dean of the U of M’s College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Sciences, but haven’t yet gotten a response from him to comment on GOOD’s story.

Granted, such environmental justice-oriented classes don’t necessarily speak to the practices of all teachers at the U of M’s St. Paul campus, but local and sustainable agriculture is big business these days—as more urban environmental justice advocates from the cities demand it, more farmers are figuring out ways to provide it. If Stanford had presented reasons why she thought the U of M’s agriculture programs didn’t prepare its students for current trends in food production, I’d be more interested in what she has to say. But since she doesn’t even cite some of the things she’s learning in her class, I’m left wondering if she simply made assumptions about the school’s programs without interviewing any faculty or reviewing its research when she presented her questions.

The truth is there are problems with the devotion to organic food. Organic food is often not any healthier and sometimes isn’t any better for the environment. On top of that, there is no legal definition of “organic,” meaning that food sold under such a label can have widely varying practices. There’s a genuine debate among environmental justice folks as to whether “organic” food is just a PR stunt or a new way forward for food production.

But such nuances never made it into Stanford’s original post. Since the post was part of a series, I hope she’ll investigate her original claims a bit more closely with the next post.

Kay Steiger is the editor of CampusProgress.org.

Related Stories

• HBO’s ‘Girls’—More Progressive Than Carrie Bradshaw, But Still White-Only
• How ‘The Lorax’ Highlights the Role of Youth in the Climate Movement
• Top 5 American Treasures to Protect in 2012
• British TV Ad Asks: Watching Yourself, ‘Would You See Rape?’
• Fashion Line Refuses to Reveal Aboriginal Artist Behind Newest Collection