Retilling The Field
Historically Black land-grant institutions are growing agricultural programs despite a difficult climate.

"As my mother used to say: ‘There's more than one way to get in a house other than going in the front door.'"
That piece of wisdom is offered by Dr. James H. Walker Jr., the senior associate research director of the 1890 Evans-Allen Research Program at South Carolina State University. The "house" to which he refers figuratively is agriculture — and the means of entry is agriculture education.
Though the front door of agriculture appeared to be closing on African Americans — as indicated by the declining number of Black farmers as well as a diminishing number of schools and departments of agriculture at historically Black land-grant institutions —  HBCUs are finding other ways of getting into the house.
"While we do want to have Black ownership of farms, we recognize the reality of the situation — that the students need to learn to be productive in that big agribusiness industry out there," says Dr. Lucy J. Reuben, Dean of Business at South Carolina State University.
The degree in agribusiness seems to have replaced the degree in agriculture at many HBCUs. And while agribusiness education has many of the components of agriculture education — like raising crops and livestock and conducting research — the course of study is designed to prepare students for many different aspects of the food processing chain.
"There are so many ways to combine agriculture with other disciplines," says Verneta Gaskins, a graduate student conducting agricultural research in the Biotechnology Center at the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore. "There's more to [agriculture education] than just picking."
For example, Gaskins has been experimenting with verticillum wilt, a condition that produces spores that choke the vascular system of plants, inhibiting their ability to absorb water. And fellow graduate student Candace Burnette has been poring over taste-test surveys in search of the proper combination of moisture, firmness and texture that will translate into high marketability for the food products being examined.
Regardless of the proliferation of agribusiness education opportunities, the decline in the number of Black farmers is worrisome — despite the generations-old trend. The slavery stigma, discrimination, second-class funding of historically Black colleges of agriculture — the land-grant schools founded for Blacks in 1890 as opposed to the traditionally White 1862 land-grant institutions — and the sacrifice of those schools at the altar of desegregation have all contributed to the current problem.
For example, after the Adams v. Richardson ruling in the early 1970s, South Carolina State lost its school of agriculture — among other things.
"When Adams came, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare was required to issue official desegregation guidelines," explains Dr. Christopher Brown, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign who attended S.C. State as an undergraduate at that time. He would later become an instructor in the institution's School of Education. "That's when they first started talking about program duplication and enrollment and faculty demographics."
To meet the federal guidelines, the states involved engaged in negotiations with their colleges and universities over programs, funding and the racial demographics of the institutions. Because Clemson University already had an agriculture school, S.C. State agreed to give up its school of agriculture in exchange for an agribusiness program — which was to be the only such program in the state.
"We no longer have a college of agriculture but we do have a program in agribusiness" that is part of the business school, Reuben says. "We believe that in the business school, we are putting forth a model of agriculture management … that will benefit the farmers of South Carolina."
According to Reuben, her institution's agribusiness program runs on "two tracks, so to speak. On the one hand, we have outreach and conventional assistance to farmers [including] a rural development and cooperative development component. We stress modern management techniques [that will help both] agribusiness [and] farm management and cooperative development.
"At the same time, we have a very modern managerial-oriented agribusiness program," she continues. "We carry on a number of workshops and seminars that will assist farmers throughout the state and at our centers and business school. We try to assist farmers directly in applying managerial perspectives appropriately in the contest of farm
management."
However, there are those who feel that South Carolina State and many of the other 1890 institutions — and their students — got shortchanged in the negotiations with their state governments and higher education boards.
"Clemson still maintains the largest ag. program in the state," Brown laments, yet the institution only graduated four Black students with bachelor's degrees in agricultural sciences in 1998. "South Carolina State has an 1890 program that is significantly smaller in scope."
And Brown finds that somewhat ironic because, "the HEW guidelines had a requirement that each state's desegregation plan include efforts to assist Black colleges and to maintain and support those colleges."
In 1988, while William Bennett was U.S. Secretary of Education, the Office of Civil Rights reviewed the 14 Adams states that submitted acceptable plans to see if they were in compliance with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Seven states were released from OCR oversight. Seven others — Ohio, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Texas — were not.
Then in 1992, the Supreme Court ruled that the de jure states had a duty to remove all vestiges of past discrimination. According to Raymond Pierce of OCR, the standard was no longer a simple checklist. (see related story, pg.96) Now, if anything the state did has a leftover effect, that state could be found in violation of the Civil Rights Act. The Clinton Administration then proceeded to address the remaining states that were not in compliance.
"When you look at states to see if there are any vestiges that could practically be eliminated, you look to several areas," Pierce says. "The Supreme Court said we should be looking at funding, mission statements and infrastructure and facilities. And they said we needed to determine whether or not there were any programs that were being unnecessarily duplicated."
But preventing the duplication of programs has been problematic.
"We have been fighting that off, but I don't know how much longer we will be able to continue to fight it off," Pierce says. "At some point, HBCUs are going to need other defenses [to maintain their programs]. The further you get from the time [when the discrimination was supposed to have occurred], the more difficult it will be to justify the need" for the OCR oversight.
"The goal has always been the desegregation of the state system of higher education and not the desegregation of the HBCUs," Pierce maintains.
Officials at the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore seem to be taking Pierce's advice on the issue of duplication.
"The Maryland Higher Education Commission refuses to duplicate programs," says Dr. Carolyn B. Brooks, dean of the School of Agricultural and Natural Sciences at the UMES. "We've been trying to get a Ph.D. program in food sciences."
In an effort to hurdle the obstacle, the university has brought a lawsuit before the Maryland courts that would allow the duplication of programs if obstacles prevent all students from accessing those offerings.
Brooks is also concerned that the 1862 schools are currently raising standards. That, she says, could affect the ability of many minority students to get the kind of education that they need to advance in the agriculture business.
"If you are going to raise the standards at the 1862s, then these minority students [who don't meet those standards or need remedial help] aren't going to get in there," she says. And because of the standards, "ag. majors and graduate students are predominantly White."
But Brooks does see the potential for change in that position — at least in her state — noting that the University of Maryland-College Park, the state's only other land-grant institution, is interested in duplicating programs offered at UMES. That, she says, should make it easier to present her case for new course offerings.
"It's not quite as bad as it was," Brooks says. "But we have to fight for every little piece we get. If we want to duplicate, we have to partner with other schools. We can't have our own program."