Jumping Into Civic Life: Stories of Public Work From Extension Professionals by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, Government, Civics, Reference & Language, Education & Teaching, Administration
ISBN: 9781945577390
Amazon: B07HNRFXW5
Goodreads: 42099552
Publisher: Kettering Foundation Press
Published: 2018-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

Interview conducted by Theodore R. Alter

Postscript—Bill McGowan was appointed the USDA Rural Development State Director for Delaware and Maryland in 2013. His picture of Norman Rockwell’s Norman Rockwell Visits a County Agent hangs prominently on the wall and reminds him daily of why Extension work—public work—is so important.

Showing Up and Being There

A Profile of Daryl Buchholz

Associate Director (Ret.), Cooperative Extension

Kansas State University

Critics like Wendell Berry have long condemned agricultural Extension faculty, administrators, and county-based agents for being arrogant technocrats who advance their own career interests, and the interests of large multinational corporations, instead of the public’s. As such, they could be seen as exemplars of an anti-democratic rather than a democratic professionalism who have institutionalized—for more than a century in American higher education—a deeply damaging misalignment between institutional routines and citizens’ work and values. In light of this charge, how surprising and refreshing it is to hear Daryl Buchholz’s voice. It does not speak with a technocratic, corporate-serving arrogance, but reflects, instead, a democratic, public-minded humility. Telling us how important “showing up and being there and having a personal relationship” has been in his many years of Extension work in Missouri and Kansas, he reveals how and why he has been willing to engage in difficult conversations that reveal some of his own imperfections. What he says to farmers and others who don’t work for universities, in a way that opens a path for deliberative public work that respects different forms and sources of knowledge, “I don’t know. That sounds like a problem we need to work on, and maybe we work on it together.”

My name is Daryl Buchholz. I am associate director for the Cooperative Extension service at Kansas State University. My official title is Associate Director for Extension and Applied Research. The responsibilities are providing the day-to-day leadership role for Cooperative Extension, where my immediate supervisor is the dean of the College of Agriculture and director for the Cooperative Extension service and the agricultural experiment station. I have been in this position for just a little more than six years.

To give you a picture of Extension in Kansas, we have 265 local Extension positions across the state. We have 105 counties. We’re actively engaged in organizing multicounty units or districts, which is made possible by an organizational structure and funding opportunity that was created by state statute. Currently we have about one-third of the counties in some kind of formal, multicounty relationship. It is a locally driven effort; that’s the reason why all 105 counties are not organized in multicounty districts. They sort of happen with two counties coming together, one district at a time.

Currently about 225 to 230 of the 265 local Extension positions are filled. We have a certain number that are being held open. We also have some local funding situations that force counties to hold positions open, given the state of the economy. In addition to that, we have about 80 FTEs of faculty who have Cooperative Extension responsibilities across the College of Agriculture, College of Human Ecology, and the College of Engineering.

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