Russell Frank: We've Got to Get Ourselves Back to the Garden

At first glance, we, the faculty of the Pennsylvania State University, appear to be sorely negligent in the performance of our duties.

As befits an institution that was originally called the Farmers’ High School (1855) and whose name was later changed to the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania (1862), our charter calls for the “instruction of youth in the art of farming.”

In fact, our bucolic campus (Latin for “field”) was chosen, in part, for its serviceability as a farm, to be worked by the “pupils [who] shall thus be instructed and taught all things necessary to be known by a farmer.”

This commitment to agriculture education, by the way, is why six of the 32 trustees charged with governing an institution of higher learning are supposed to represent “organized agricultural societies or organizations.”

(Keith Masser, the board’s new vice chairman, is one of the six. In 2005 he was named the Vance Publishing Potato Man of the Year, a title to which very few of us could lay claim. With Masser as veep and Karen Peetz as the new chair, should we henceforth refer to board of trustees meetings as Masser-Peetz Theatre?)

Notwithstanding this clear ag-ed orientation, very few of us faculty types know beans about farming. Where I come from, for example, dairy was a meatless meal. A spread was something you put on a bagel. Ranch was a salad dressing. The Garden was where the Knicks played. Barns were what wild pitchers couldn’t hit the broad side of. A bushel and a peck measured degrees of romantic attachment.

A city slicker like me is supposed to instruct youth in the art of farming?

Well, if we read further into the charter we see that the university’s founders held a laudably expansive idea of what kinds of expertise the faculty should have: “a knowledge of the English language, grammar, geography, history, mathematics, chemistry, and such other branches of natural and exact science as will conduce to the proper education of a farmer.”

Heck, I teach knowledge of the English language and grammar. And journalism is often said to be the first rough draft of history. What’s more, our journalism classes are aggier than they might at first appear. Students who take them learn how to cultivate sources, rake muck and separate the wheat from the chaff, all of which prepares them to produce journalism worthy of a Pullet Surprise.

Still, we could do more. I think of an interview I did with an Italian-American guy who took me on a tour of his garden. “Italians hate a lawn,” he declared. “We don’t grow anything we can’t eat.”

Think of how much lawn can be turned to ag-educational use here at University Park. Every college or department could have its own plot. The English Department could plant a Shakespeare garden. The historians could grow heirloom vegetables. The anthropologists could use their knowledge of ethnobotany to raise medicinal plants.

Business majors could open a petting zoo featuring bulls and bears. Or, if the Smeal College of Business wanted to collaborate with the College of Communications and the political science department, the menagerie could include hawks, doves, donkeys, elephants, lame ducks, watchdogs, paper tigers and pigs, provided they wear lipstick.

Meanwhile, at the residence halls, the students could sow their wild oats.  What, they’re already doing that? So much the better!

Alternatively, we could keep the campus the way it is and change the university’s charter and bylaws. After all, they’ve been changed before, lots of times. Everything from the name of the institution (Pennsylvania State College in 1874, Pennsylvania State University in 1953) to the number of trustees (32 to 23 to 32 to 31 to 32), to the way in which the trustees are chosen.

Some people think 32 trustees is too darned many and would like to see a more streamlined board.

Some think agriculture is now over-represented on the board, given how much the Farmers’ High School has grown beyond its aggie roots.

Some wonder why the composition of the board of trustees privileges business and agriculture over other fields of endeavor such as the arts, the humanities and the social sciences. And what qualifies corporate types to call the shots at an institution of higher learning, anyway? You don’t see too many academics on the boards of the corporations, do you?

Finally, some wonder whether it’s a conflict of interest for the governor of the commonwealth to serve on the board of trustees, given that the governor is often trying to minimize the state’s appropriation to the university while the board of trustees should be trying to maximize the state’s appropriation to the university.   

Ah, but guess who has the power to amend the charter and bylaws of the university. Yep, the board of trustees.

Now where’s my muck rake?