TY - JOUR
T1 - A Manifesto for a Progressive Land-Grant Mission in an Authoritarian Populist Era
AU - Goldstein, Jenny E.
AU - Paprocki, Kasia
AU - Osborne, Tracey
N1 - Funding Information:
Amid the Civil War and in the wake of the Industrial Revolution—a moment of social, political, and economic upheaval in the United States— Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act of 1862 into law, establishing the country’s first land-grant universities. With one land grant in each state, these institutions were created to support communities in the states in which they were based through research, teaching, and extension work. At their founding, land-grant universities were one of the clearest elaborations of democratic ideals in U.S. higher education: an egalitarian opportunity for all Americans, not only elites, to find pathways for university study, particularly through engagement with the agricultural sciences. Yet, from the beginning there was ambiguity and conflict over what was entailed in this vision and how it could be achieved. Gelber (2013) wrote that at their founding in the late nineteenth century, rival visions he characterized as elitist and populist struggled over the character and content of land-grant research and education. The land-grant mission has thus always been tied to broader political currents, through continued financial support from state and federal governments, and served an important role in social and economic development locally, nationally, and even globally. Simultaneously, the land-grant mission, with its emphasis on community participation, provides opportunities for more progressive research, education, and public engagement. In this article, we argue that scholars based at land-grant universities have an opportunity to directly address rising strains of authoritarian populism in contemporary U.S. politics through their positions in these unique institutions. This means both confronting the systems of power that have shaped the current political moment and grappling with the role of knowledge generated by land-grant university scholars in that process. Even as we do so, we acknowledge that the challenges that authoritarian populism poses to our universities and communities are deeply structural and cannot be addressed by individual scholars alone. Nevertheless, we find that the land-grant mandate offers important openings for constructing spaces of resistance to authoritarian populism. We identify opportunities to forge new alliances, collectivities, and platforms for developing and pursuing grounded alternatives.
Funding Information:
7. Cornell University’s Alliance for Science is one example, a program funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that supports research on and advocacy for genetically modified crops and foods (Schnurr 2015; Antoniou and Robinson 2017).
PY - 2019/3/4
Y1 - 2019/3/4
N2 - In this article, we offer a manifesto for a progressive twenty-first century land-grant mission in an era of rising authoritarian populism in the United States. We explore the historical context of this mode of political engagement, argue that scholars based at land-grant universities are uniquely positioned to address this political moment, and offer examples of land-grant scholars who have embraced this political obligation directly. In the midst of the U.S. Civil War, the federal government provided grants of land to one college in every state to establish universities especially with extension-oriented missions committed to agricultural research and training; today, there are seventy-six land-grant universities. Just as the constitution of these universities at a significant moment in the country’s history served a political purpose, the current political climate demands a robust political response from contemporary land-grant scholars. Given the mandate for land-grant universities to serve their communities, how can a critical land-grant mission respond to the current political moment of emergent authoritarian populism in the United States and internationally? What responsibilities are entailed in the land-grant mission? We consider some strategies that land-grant scholars are employing to engage with communities grappling most directly with economic stagnation, climate change, and agrarian dispossession. We also suggest that, amid the dramatically shifting political climate in the United States, all scholars regardless of land-grant affiliation should be concerned with land-grant institutions’ capacities to engage with the country’s most disenfranchised populations as a means to pushing back against authoritarian populism. Key Words: authoritarian populism, higher education, land-grant institutions, public geographies, United States.
AB - In this article, we offer a manifesto for a progressive twenty-first century land-grant mission in an era of rising authoritarian populism in the United States. We explore the historical context of this mode of political engagement, argue that scholars based at land-grant universities are uniquely positioned to address this political moment, and offer examples of land-grant scholars who have embraced this political obligation directly. In the midst of the U.S. Civil War, the federal government provided grants of land to one college in every state to establish universities especially with extension-oriented missions committed to agricultural research and training; today, there are seventy-six land-grant universities. Just as the constitution of these universities at a significant moment in the country’s history served a political purpose, the current political climate demands a robust political response from contemporary land-grant scholars. Given the mandate for land-grant universities to serve their communities, how can a critical land-grant mission respond to the current political moment of emergent authoritarian populism in the United States and internationally? What responsibilities are entailed in the land-grant mission? We consider some strategies that land-grant scholars are employing to engage with communities grappling most directly with economic stagnation, climate change, and agrarian dispossession. We also suggest that, amid the dramatically shifting political climate in the United States, all scholars regardless of land-grant affiliation should be concerned with land-grant institutions’ capacities to engage with the country’s most disenfranchised populations as a means to pushing back against authoritarian populism. Key Words: authoritarian populism, higher education, land-grant institutions, public geographies, United States.
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U2 - 10.1080/24694452.2018.1539648
DO - 10.1080/24694452.2018.1539648
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85061434828
VL - 109
SP - 673
EP - 684
JO - Annals of the American Association of Geographers
JF - Annals of the American Association of Geographers
SN - 2469-4452
IS - 2
ER -