Toto, We’re Not in Morrill America Anymore

President Herbert Hoover meeting wth Civitan members during the heyday of civic engagement in the United States.

My father, a long-serving and unusually dedicated Civitan Club member and past president, frequently bemoans the declining turnout at his monthly meetings.

After reading John Gravois’s marvelous account “The Lions of Lagos,” I think I’m now slightly better equipped to explain to him why this is occurring.

I even think the factors Gravois cites to account for the headlong decline in U.S. civic engagement also account for another significant development in 21^st century American life: our transformation into a post-Morrill nation.

There are reasons why places like Kerala, India, possess Lion club memberships larger than the entire state of Kansas: Civic club activism appeals to people at a critical juncture in their nation’s development.

They are the same reasons why, 200 years ago, frontier America provided the seedbed for civic groups that eventually grew into old standbys such as Rotary, Civitan, Toastmasters and Boy Scouts.  As Gravois oberves:

…the catalysts were industrialization, massive urban migration, the rise of corporations, and breakneck economic growth. Jefferson bumpkins streamed into Hamiltonian industrial cities; a good portion of the Old World’s tired, poor, and huddled masses were freshly arrived too. The social networks that had once served these new arrivals back at home were either dashed to pieces, left behind, or else ill-suited to helping them and advance and associate in this new world.

Today places such as Vapi, India, Lagos, Nigeria, Kalisizo, Uganda, and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, provide starkly similar seedbeds.

“It’s the proverbial yokel going to town,” says Anirudh Krishna, a Duke University professor whom Gravois quotes in the article. “His sleeves are too short, he knows his table manners are atrocious, his breath smells like garlic.”

Much as they did in the United States in the 19^th century, civic groups in cities and towns throughout many developing nations provide the educational setting in which these provincials learn to shed these undesirable traits and to assimilate into urban life.

As regular visitors to this site probably already have ascertained by now, I think there is a lesson here for Cooperative Extension.

The same impulses that gave rise to civic activism and engagement in the United States in the 19^th century also served as the impetus behind Morrill Act, which provided American farming and laboring classes with a dense network of land-grant schools — schools through which millions of ordinary Americans were able to secure higher education and ascend to the professional classes.

These initial gains were strengthened through passage of the Hatch and Smith-Lever acts, which established agricultural research facilities and outreach programs, respectively, on behalf of these groups.  These acts went a long way toward securing the economic and cultural order that not only mitigated these class distinctions but also largely resolved them.

This is the take-home message from Gravois’s article: In a real sense, the success of these legislative acts secured a post-Morrill educational and cultural landscape — not necessarily a hostile landscape but one that will require a rethinking of how Cooperative Extension educators interact with our increasingly sophisticated client base.

We can still function as an agency of empowerment, but not in the ways we have in the past. Our role in the future will be as curators, providing our clients with deeper, more enriched learning contexts so that they can resolve many of their problems on their own.

The fact that Kervala, India, now boasts more Rotary Clubs than the entire state of Kansas speaks volumes about the kind of radically changed environment in which Extension educators will be operating in the 21^st century.

Toto, we’re not in Morrill America anymore.

Economic Malaise, Cooperative Extension Opportunity

While house and car sales will eventually rise to their old numbers, the old consumer economy is gone and isn't coming back, writes New York Times economist journalist David Leonhardt

“We’re spent,” writes David Leonhardt in The New York Times’s July 18 Sunday Review section, and this hard reality has major implications for the prospects of America’s long-term recovery.

Deficits, inadequate stimulus packages, the looming threat of China may all play a part in our economic woes, but the pink elephant is consumer spending — or, more accurately, the acute lack of it.

The economic statistics are telling: The auto industry is predicted to sell 28 percent fewer vehicles in 2011. Sales of stoves and ovens are projected to be at their lowest level since 1992.

This bad news brings me back to a point I’ve raised time and again in this forum: the growing American preoccupation with leaner, more sustainable lifestyles — the challenge of doing more with less — and the role Cooperative Extension educators can play at all levels and in all disciplines in pointing the way toward these new ways of living and working.

Mind you, I’m not just talking about environmental sustainability.  In these lean times, sustainability is now a term used liberally, not only to stress the need for federal and state fiscal prudence but also to foster healthier personal and family finances.

As the New York Times’s Roger Cohen argued in a column several years ago, the shock that followed the 2008 market crash put Americans into a “different mental place.”

It is small wonder why, considering in retrospect how unsustainable the old consumer mindset was.  As Leonhardt observes:

In past years, many of these consumers could have relied on debt, often a home-equity line of credit or a credit card, to tide them over. Debt soared in the late 1980s, 1990s and the last decade, which allowed spending to grow faster than incomes and helped cushion every recession in that period.

Sooner or later, Leonhardt stresses, a newer, more sustainable economic model inevitably will take its place — a model that lays considerably greater emphasis on investment and production.

One thing is certain, Leonhardt stresses: “The old consumer economy is gone, and it’s not coming back.”

While house and car sales eventually will surpass their old highs following economic recovery and population increases, levels of consumer spending will not return to their old levels, he contends.

Why? Because it was driven by money that people didn’t have.

“The choice, then, is between starting to make the transition to a different economy and enduring years of stop-and-start economic malaise,” Leonhardt writes.

This hard reality presents Extension educators with a tremendous opportunity.  A breach has formed within the American psyche, one that we are primed to fill.

Americans are taking their first tepid steps toward this new, considerably more sustainable model — steps that will require a rethinking of the way they conduct their lives both at work and at home.

No other public or private entity is better equipped than we are to fill the deep psychological breach that has formed during the Great Recession. Likewise, no one is better equipped to help Americans undertake the initial steps toward a new economic model.

As I see it, this presents an even bigger opportunity than demonstrating our continued relevance.  It is also an opportunity to undertake a much-needed organizational transformation in the way we conceive and deliver our programs.

Are we up to the challenge?