re: #103 austin_blue

Too bad most of the people … have no concept of the power of multi-nationals and how they affect their lives. …

I’m almost done surveying the graduate Horticulture (or what used to be called “horticulture” and now goes by many different names) programs in this country (there are a couple of dozen of any merit) and it’s becoming clear how much the international agri-business industry has reshaped academic agriculture programs into their image.

Some of the larger and older programs are feeders to Monsanto, ADM and the like, of freshly minted graduates. In return those companies make sure that those programs are well funded, either directly through donations or by lobbying the appropriate congress-critter/Senator.

The money is critical for grad student support (since most anyone can’t afford an out-of-state annual tuition, as it is customary to go to graduate school not in your own locale) and funding of research programs to allow the profs to generate the papers to be published, which in turns gives them legitimacy in the eyes of greater academia.

These sort of feedbacks are not surprising, but I am a bit overwhelmed by the changes that have occurred since I was last in school 30 some years ago. Heck, when I was in school one could still find a department labeled “botany”, the hort departments were about breeding plants (for all sorts of human use), and “agriculture” was about raising animals as well as the major cereal crops.

This is due in part because of the rise of genetics/genomics as the dominant player in the conceptual-space of anything to do with the “life sciences”, but then again this development has been very, very expensive and that is where the dependence has come in for departments to need multi-million dollar facilities, and the only way to get those is to find sugar daddies, and that drives them to the multi-billion dollar international conglomerates as well as being dependent upon the USDA, whose funding in turn is dependent upon the Congressmen who themselves depend upon the donations from the big concerns.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave.