… can be as big as all outdoors.
In 1997, the owner of a massive cattle ranch in Wyoming gave it to Colorado State University and the University of Wyoming “for hands-on agriculture education.” But the universities say “the working ranch isn’t a very practical place for students to learn,” and have now put it up for sale.
The donor threatens to sue, since it seems to her that the universities “violated the gift agreement by insufficiently promoting the ranch to university faculty as an available educational tool.”
Why hasn’t the educational set-up worked? “To date, the ranch has had 25 interns and employees from both universities studying geology, range and wildlife management, and equine studies.” That’s in fourteen years.
The same University of Wyoming newspaper, in another article on the subject, increases the number:
In the past, the ranch has had more than 50 interns from a wide variety of fields, including art and geology. Japanese ranchers have visited, and students from Europe have asked to intern at the ranch.
That’s still ridiculously tiny.
To UD’s madly idealizing, hopelessly coastal mind, 50,000 gorgeous acres, a working cattle ranch, should be a spectacular acquisition for a land-grant university interested in maintaining and improving a state’s traditional way of life. It should also be attractive to a university’s art departments, to environmentalists, to scientists…
UW dean of the College of Agriculture, Francis Galey, told the AP, “It’s a very, very efficient and lean working operation. So the way it was set up staffing-wise, there just wasn’t a way to accommodate the teaching we wanted to do.”
I’m not sure what this means. No one on the staff was willing to teach? Isn’t that what the professor is supposed to do? Or am I picking up the possibility that the staff simply wasn’t very cooperative with the whole educational thing — wanted to be left alone to do its work? Disrupted classes?
Wyoming’s student paper writes:
The hidden message is that more educated ranchers do not work the land. They work in management and let unskilled workers work the land. This shift in ranch politics will mean fewer jobs and less state revenue. Family run ranches will quickly become a thing of the past, confined to western movies and stories told by grandparents.
In this Working Ranch article, more reasons emerge, mainly having to do with difficult access and hard winters and the fact that both universities have closer similar facilities (which maybe undermines the claim about the sale’s hidden message).
The darkest theory is that the schools just held onto the land as long as they had to legally and are now selling it because it’s insanely valuable. They’ll get around twenty million, apparently. They say the money will go to agricultural scholarships, but I wonder…
September 7th, 2012 at 4:37PM
For another discussion on donor intent see The Art of the Steal at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_the_Steal_(film).
September 7th, 2012 at 4:55PM
For a note on the termination of a charitable trust by the acqusition of the broadcast license and assets of classical WCAL FM by Minnesota Public Radio see Tis A Gift to be Simple at http://ptable.blogspot.com/2009/10/tis-gift-to-be-simple-i-dont-often-have.html#links.
September 7th, 2012 at 5:43PM
Thanks, Michael.
September 8th, 2012 at 10:31AM
I can’t imagine running an AGRICULTURE department and not being able to figure out some educationally-useful and financially-sustainable way of using it. Why, it would be like a business school being given a factory or a department store and not being able to think of a way of using it in their coursework….Oh wait:
Warren Bennis and Jim O’Toole, in their article How Business Schools Lost Their Way, note that once, many years ago, the course in production management at MIT was taught by the manager of a nearby General Motors assembly plant, and go on to say “Virtually none of today’s top-ranked business schools would hire, let alone promote, a tenure track professor whose primary qualification is managing an assembly plant, no matter how distinguished his or her performance.” Indeed, they remark that “Today it is posible to find tenured professors of management who have never set foot inside a real business, except at customers.”
Wouldn’t have expected to find this as much in agriculture, though.