Forward with the Original Land-Grant Concept

We've heard and read a great deal lately about change in the Cooperative Extension System (CES), as if the notion of change was new to it.Boyle doubted that CES is capable of making the changes needed to be consequential to American society as we move into the 21st century.He notes correctly that CES won't change unless individuals in the system are willing to change.Fortunately, most of these individuals share at least some elements of a basic philosophy about the role of research and education in helping society overcome current problems and avoid problems in the future.Nevertheless, Boyle's article, essentially an admonition to CES that we must change to remain relevant, raises several important points.We will try to address a few of them briefly.It's important to do a careful analysis of what exactly needs to be changed.Some aspects of CES aren't broken, so they don't need fixing.This point seldom gets mentioned.Furthermore, most of the change needed isn't in the philosophical underpinnings of CES, but in how these have been operationalized, or in some cases not operationalized.For example, the involvement of local people in identifying Extension and research program priorities is an old way of doing business, but still sound.Another fundamental precept of CES that needn't change is that educational programming should be based on research of the land-grant universities and USDA.The degree to which the translation of research results to educational programming can occur is determined largely by the nature of the research, which in turn is determined by the priorities given to research topics.A change that's needed is to do a better job of integrating research and Extension, including the identification of research priorities.Assurance of this begins with faculty at land-grant universities who are committed to solving real-world problems and are recognized and rewarded for doing so.This doesn't mean employing only people with what has been called "applied" research interests.Given that we have faculty in the land-grant university who are predisposed to relevance in their research, CES needs a stronger role in identifying current and emerging research topics and in refining the research questions to be addressed.