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Through the Looking Glass: Adventures in Landgrant Land
By Karl North | February 27, 2010
Through the Looking Glass: Adventures
in Landgrant Land
- Karl North, 5-09
“If Alice were reborn in these times, she would not need to step through the mirror; it would suffice that she lean out the window.” – Eduardo Galeano
Once upon a time in a faraway empire, a land so prosperous it overflowed with gmo milk, high fructose corn syrup, soyaburgers, and several thousand brands of breakfast cereal, there thrived a great university on a hill, its gothic arches draped with ivy, and its graduate schools swarming with the cream of intelligent youth lured from the elite classes of lesser nations.
On this fount of learning and knowledge the emperor had bestowed a great honor and duty: in return for the gift of land from the common wealth[1] on which to erect its halls and towers, the institution’s sages and sorcerers pledged to minister to the welfare of all the peasantry of the surrounding province. Thus it earned the title of “landgrant university”.
One of the deeds that launched the reputation of landgrant sages throughout the realm was to work a spell on a golden grain developed by earlier peasant tribes (see footnote), that reduced its many varietal adaptations to a single form, which they called “high bred corn”, because it allowed the feudal nobility to take control of the seed. Claims (later proven to be unfounded[2]) that this alchemy was the only way to raise yields led to its adoption everywhere, replacing the previous genetic diversity and making the golden grain extremely vulnerable to sweeping plagues. The magical method that produced this great invention, now known as ‘reductionist science’, became the hallmark of landgrant sorcery and the template for scholarly work in every corner of the realm.
With the passage of time the university grew richer and gained numerous new fields of study and architectural anomalies, but the peasants grew poorer with every brilliant new tool the scholars devised to help them grow and harvest their crops. A small band of the most unruly peasants, known throughout the province as the ‘organos’ began to reject the teachings of the landgrant, and vowed to build a new way of thinking about the land and its cultivation. United around the motto, “Feed the soil, not the plant!”, they soon would have nothing more to do with the scholars in their towers.
By happenstance one of the more fractious farmers in this breakaway faction was himself a recovering would-have-been academic, so was somewhat schooled in the exotic rituals and dialects of the university. One day, out-standing in his field, tending his flock, and ruminating on the ills of the world, he mused, “What a waste of grey matter is cloistered in yonder ivory towers. I hear some of its scholars are looking for a new way of doing science. Even there is talk among them of ‘stakeholder accountability’, which in peasant dialect means simply ‘living up to their pledge’ to us rural folk. Perhaps my fluency with the folkways of academe might be of use to breach the rift.”
So he set about recruiting a few of the more unconventional peasants and scholars to a learning community that, convening on neutral ground, would begin dialogue and work toward a new tradition of science. Initially this effort failed abysmally. Scholars would make no time for a project that might only put an ugly dent in their career path, and were loath to leave the cozy intellectual security of the ivory tower, even for lunch. Presaging the sages, key organos refused to participate on grounds that the magical magnetic field of reductive science would, like a strange attractor, hold the scholars in thrall, and preclude attainment of neutral ground in any meaningful way.
In those days the university’s ruling directorate, feeling a tickle of pressure from the peasant masses, decided to create a chair of sustainable agriculture to make over their image to a shade of green. Not wanting to really change anything, they chose a professor who professed no competence to teach or do research in the field. He made a perfect choice for the sinecure, being a likeable and well-meaning bloke whose long career in administration had taught him never to rock the boat.
Not wanting to admit failure, the fractious peasant submitted to an unhealthy alliance with the new purported scholar of sustainable agriculture, who agreed to recruit peers from his list of likely academic suspects, to lend his secretary to administer the project, and even to fund a monthly free lunch, provided that meetings occurred on campus.
Christened SALSA, or Stakeholder Alliance for Landgrant Science Accountability, the group met for two years and engaged in such trivial pursuits as facelifting the university with a revival of its ancient visionary, Liberty Hyde the Bailiff, and disputing the value of the university’s floating lettuce factory. Resistant to proposed reading outside the cozy bounded rationality of their disciplines, the sages persistently refused to discuss even the meaning of sustainability, claiming it could not be defined, but really fearing its lure toward subversive territory. Organo participants, smelling an attempt to put an organo face on junk alchemy, began to desert the learning community in disgust, and conflict ensued, revealing institutional loyalties that trumped free academic inquiry. The project ended suddenly when the sponsor surreptitiously ended the administrative support, and the free lunch. The peasant organizer, having retreated to his agrarian idyll, could be found again standing out in his field, often ruminating (with his flock) on the old folk adage, “There is no Free Lunch”.
As for the landgrant, it flounders on, a wounded dinosaur suffering the increasing slings and arrows of changing times in its declining, faraway empire.
[1] Actually this land and most of the land in the realm was expropriated from earlier tribes of peasants by the paleface invaders who then herded the original landholders into strategic hamlets on the most barren lands controlled by the empire. This strategy worked so well that it was used to subdue rebellious native peasant populations in all subsequent imperial conquests.
[2] The Political Economy of Hybrid Corn, Jean-Pierre Berlan and R.C. Lewontin, Monthly Review, July-August, 1986.
Topics: Political and Economic Organization, Social Futures, Peak Oil, Relocalization, Uncategorized | No Comments »
