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Show Land Grant College Role Spreads Service to U. S. Urban Regions The nation's lang grant system of higher education, which is observing its centennial this year was established when 85 per cent of the population lived in rural areas. Land grant and state colleges col-leges and universities, together with the county agent, accelerated accelerat-ed the transition of the American rural economy from handicraft agriculture to modern, scientific mechanized agriculture. Now, with 70 per cent of the nation's population city and suburban sub-urban dwellers, the colleges and universities are shifting into a somewhat similar role of service to urban communities. ' One of their obvious contributions contribu-tions is the training of such spe- cialists as city managers and city planners and of "urban general-ists" general-ists" capable of attacking the complex problems of exploding cities, deteriorating urban gray areas and new suburbs. Another role consists of research re-search into the problems, drawing draw-ing on a variety of university departments from economics to public health. A third role is the provision of direct services to communities and neighborhoods in the form of urban agents or research team either to help solve an immediate problem or to work on a continuing con-tinuing basis. Anticipating that such programs pro-grams may attract considerable federal, state and local funds, the Ford Foundation in 1959 began be-gan a program of grants for urban ur-ban extension experiments to determine the best patterns for using massive funds wisely. The pilot programs seek to determine in actual urban problems the exact role colleges and universities uni-versities can play, the degree of community support for such programs, pro-grams, their contribution to the university teaching and research programs, and the means of enlisting en-listing all relevant university departments and divisions in the problems. One concerns the physical and government problems of metropolitan metro-politan areas, which comprise political, economic and sociological sociologi-cal factors. In one sense, therefore, there-fore, the "urban scientist is an educator, with the entire community com-munity as his class," says Dean Thurman White of the College of Continuing education at the University Uni-versity of Oklahoma. "He should be in a position to assist his constituents con-stituents by providing them with information and on more complex com-plex isues, directing them to the authority in this particular area. He should be able to explain the methodology, the procedures, or the techniques by which a city or town can go about solving its own problems." The other set of problems concerns con-cerns the social consequences of urban sprawl. Thus, one of the three demonstration areas selected select-ed by the University of Wisconsin Wiscon-sin urban extension program is predominantly rural Columbia County. urban activities. To date, the Foundation has made grants totaling $3,158,000. Six have gone directly to universities uni-versities Delaware, Oklahoma, Purdue, Rutgers and Wisconsin. Four other universities, Carnegie Institute, Duquesne, Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvania State, are involved in-volved in a project for which a grant was made to Action-Housing, Inc., of Pittsburgh. Another grant was made to the 4-H Club Foundation for a study of the role of the 4-H movement in urban ur-ban communities. The analogy between the urban agent and the county agricultural agent, while generally valid, has limits. For example, the county agent dealt directly with individual indi-vidual farmer, informing him of new seeds, methods of cultivation, cultiva-tion, machinery and the like. The urban agent works for the most part with urban agencies and a host of government offi-:ials offi-:ials and civic groups. The universities are dealing with two major sets of urban |
