IMPROVING THE UNIVERSITY'S PERFORMANCE IN PUBLIC POLICY EDUCATION

ing and increase the well-being of all people. Our forebears proudly
organized, with public support, “definite and distinct” extension edu-
cational enterprises, backed up by a specialized university research
system, to improve the productivity of firms in agriculture. But changes
in technology have social and economic consequences. We did not
plan to have poverty, to pollute our environment, to depopulate rural
areas, to crowd people into ghettos, to dislocate people from jobs,
and to increase the per capita costs of operating rural institutions.
These problems, like many others, are external consequences of suc-
cessful transition in the production and marketing systems. A failure
to make like transitions in the human institutional systems is the
reason for these mountains of neglect.

The university can meet the challenge of supplying this knowl-
edge if it transforms itself by applying lessons from its own heritage
and by using particular contemporary business and research strategies.

Is a Different Strategy Needed?

One of the lessons is that for satisfactory progress to be made, a
research base must be provided on a scale that matches the scale of
the problems to be solved. The post World War II efforts of the Ex-
tension Service and the Agricultural Experiment Station to reorient
programs toward more broadly based human welfare problems have
been very sincere. They have been carefully developed, articulated,
and legitimized through appropriate channels of the land-grant uni-
versity system. Yet, despite these earnest efforts, the land-grant sys-
tem’s research and extension programs simply have not kept pace
with the nation’s growing human welfare problems.

It was not the same story as their record in providing technological
innovations to improve the performance of agricultural firms. This
latter enterprise and, in fact, the whole agricultural industry was con-
verted from dependence on folk knowledge to scientific knowledge in
less than fifty years. Producing new technology is still a very vital and
needed function to foster progress and meet the needs of a growing
population with rising expectations. The organization for improving
agriculture was set up as a semi-autonomous system so that it could
plan and develop from a conceptual horizon highly relevant to its
function.

Thus, a second lesson is that a “definite and distinct” organization
is needed if human resources for a new function are to perform their
function successfully. Modem industrial systems have perfected this
system of organization to a high degree. General Motors Corporation,
for example, makes Chevrolets in a separate division from its Iocomo-
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