This week’s Cityview (Des Monies, Iowa Alternative Weekly) also has a story.
Mother Earth
Imagine you’re an administrator and you’ve got this employee who’s catching a lot of attention. A guy who left a family legacy to move across state lines and take on your institution’s mission as nothing less than a personal crusade. An employee who travels so tirelessly for his job that you simply say the word “Iowa” anywhere across the country and folks in the field recite his name with a certain reverence. A director who members of your own board call “a world and national leader,” who constituents say “symbolized strength and hope.”
What do you do with an employee like that? Demote him. And do it with a 48-hour ultimatum. […]
And thanks to such potential conflicts of interest, there have been calls from the grassroots to “break the Leopold Center free” from Iowa State, a concern Kirschenmann had openly addressed with administration, asking “pointblank, is this a center of the university or a Center at the university.” So concerned about the power dynamics, he’s even gone to Paul Johnson, who helped craft the original legislation, and discovered that there were fears from the start that locating the center at Iowa State “would eventually corrupt it.”
According to a protest letter addressed to university officials circulating among activists last week, concern is mounting that Kirschenmann’s demotion is clear evidence of such corruption: “By removing Dr. Kirschenmann from this position, Iowa State University is allowing outside business interests to effectively control the agenda of a prominent American university, thereby further eroding the once unique independent status of academic institutions in American life.” And to be perfectly honest, Kirschenmann can’t say he entirely disagrees.
“This issue is not just about me or the Leopold Center,” he says. “It’s an issue about whether or not public institutions can still have intellectual pursuits without being hampered by outside pressure.”
Again, the link is good for a week. The entire story is copied below the fold.
Mother Earth
By Carolyn Szczepanski
carolyn@dmcityview.com
Imagine you’re an administrator and you’ve got this employee who’s catching a lot of attention. A guy who left a family legacy to move across state lines and take on your institution’s mission as nothing less than a personal crusade. An employee who travels so tirelessly for his job that you simply say the word “Iowa” anywhere across the country and folks in the field recite his name with a certain reverence. A director who members of your own board call “a world and national leader,” who constituents say “symbolized strength and hope.”
What do you do with an employee like that? Demote him. And do it with a 48-hour ultimatum.
It’s been said that if you drop a kernel of corn anywhere in the state of Iowa it’s almost inevitable that a harvest will follow. The same might be said of uprooting Fred Kirschenmann from the helm of the Leopold Center: get ready to reap a bumper crop of outrage from the grassroots.
Five years ago, when the advisory board of the Leopold Center – a research hub advancing environmentally and economically sustainable agriculture created by the Iowa legislature in 1987 – sought out Fred Kirschenmann to become their next director, he wasn’t looking for a leadership position; he was looking forward to spending the rest of his days on his biodynamic farm in North Dakota.
“I was very deliberately clear that if I do this, I’m doing it for only one reason: because the mission of the Leopold Center is an incredibly important mission,” Kirschenmann recalls. “And I have literally been working seven days a week for 14 hours a day passionate in that belief, doing everything I can to make that mission a reality.” For the first three years of his tenure, that work ethic won glowing reviews from his supervisors in the College of Agriculture. But then, Kirschenmann says, his leadership starting raising eyebrows from Iowa State University administration.
“I’ve been visiting with Fred for two years with concerns regarding the center,” Wendy Wintersteen, interim dean of the College of Agriculture, says. “It was not a surprise to him that the college administration was looking to address very specific issues.”
But Kirschenmann says, when he asked for specifics, he was “left to speculate.” Wintersteen did tell him he wasn’t “sufficiently responsive to Iowa stakeholders,” Kirschenmann recalls, but when he asked for clarification, she retorted, “Well, you’re the director of the center, you figure that
out.” Which was especially perplexing to Kirschenmann, who had recently completed five community hearings across the state addressing the center’s priorities and programs. “The overwhelming response was to keep doing exactly what we were doing, and an overwhelming insistence to not waste time,” he says.
“So why, two years ago, was this suddenly no longer acceptable, and I in particular, not spending enough time with stakeholder groups?” he wonders. “My response was, unless there’s something specific I need to be doing differently, I’m going to keep focused on the mission. Maybe that makes me bullheaded or unresponsive to administrative authority; I don’t know. But I made clear when I took the position that I did not agree, nor did they imply, that I had some political responsibility to smooth the waters. Maybe I was wrong about that.”
And maybe that’s why he got a curt note from Wintersteen five days before Halloween.
“I had a letter hand-delivered to my office Wednesday morning from Wendy [Wintersteen] telling me she wanted my resignation,” he recounts. “It said she had taken steps to appoint an alternative interim director [ISU organics extension coordinator, Jerry DeWitt], that they were offering me an alternative position as a distinguished fellow, and that I had until Friday morning to decide. There was some language about, ‘this freed me to do what I do best,’ but, beyond that, there weren’t any other details. So I sent a note to her, saying I thought 48 hours is not much time, and it would be in the interest of the center and the university to give me time to plan a reasonable transition strategy. But she came back with a short note, saying it was already a done deal and I had until Friday morning. That’s it.”
Sources close to Kirschenmann say they too got mid-week calls from ISU department heads, which they interpreted as “selective phone calling to lessen the emotional impact.” But such “damage control” didn’t stem a flood of electronic outrage. E-mails ricocheted across the country with messages originating from sources close to Kirschenmann, charging “the reason for Fred’s removal… seems clear. Fred had not placated agribusiness. They’ve been ferociously lobbying the dean’s office for the past year and a half to get him to stop his work on ‘Ag in the Middle’ and other projects.”
That’s not true, Wintersteen counters: “I had received a number of comments from several board members about the functioning of the center and a number of issues came together in visiting with board members that the decision was made.”
If that’s the case, the chair of the advisory board, Marvin Shirley, wasn’t party to it. “It was a shock to me,” Shirley says. “I was told several members of the board were notified a day or two before, but I wasn’t asked, I was informed.” The Minburn farmer acknowledges that he’s “somewhat troubled by the speed” and “my first reaction was on the defensive because I had the same concerns [about agribusiness pressure]. But in talking with the people involved, I think that, yes, there may have been some of that, but, no, I don’t think the university caved in, because Jerry [Dewitt] is as strong as Fred in his belief in what the Leopold Center is doing. I’m a big fan of Fred and I think that, in the long run, it will benefit him and center. If it comes out the way ISU says it will.”
The way Wintersteen described it in an e-mail to “colleagues” the day the news was posted publically, asserted that “the new arrangement is meant to allow Dr. Kirschenmann to focus his excellent work and service, while placing the main administrative duties in the hands of… DeWitt.” But many speculate that the “new arrangement” is meant to make the Leopold Center more palatable to those wielding the most political sway and financial capital. Wintersteen, danced around such allegations.
“I continued to get individual concerns from individuals farmers,” she parses carefully, to avoid implying the input of larger interest groups.
“I didn’t ask how many acres they farmed,” she adds evasively, to counteract the notion that industrial operations were bending her ear.
“I’d say the common thread would be corn, soybean and livestock productions there are not focused on niche markets,” she says, when pushed on the specifics of the concerned producers.
Put such meticulous statements together and a cynic might say that sounds an awful lot like the constituency of the hiring committee, which recently announced they would appoint a new dean – a job Wintersteen is seeking – by the first of the year. Even a glance at that committee roster reveals the “common thread” is agribusiness, including Pam Johnson, the chair of the Iowa Corn Promotion Board; Cliff Mulder, the director of the Iowa Soybean Association; and Craig Lang, president of the Iowa Farm Bureau. That’s the kind of coincidence that spurs one well-connected farmer to put succinctly a concern that was common among rural advocates last week: “Some of those members could have threatened to raise a fit if this was not straightened out.”
Even Kirschenmann acknowledges that such theories are “plausible.” After all, if administrative concerns were really about a lack of an “Iowa focus” at the Center, why not take that up with the advisory board, which approves the research projects? If it’s a matter of soliciting a more balanced slate of research proposals, why not address that to the project leaders? And if his general leadership style is in question, why not wait until the five-year external review currently underway is completed? “The whole thing is kind of bizarre,” Kirschenmann says.
To those who have worked with Kirschenmann, though, his uniquely candid, cutting-edge thinking seemed destined for a run-in with administration. Fred, they say, isn’t a safe academic whose idea of “change” is
simply tweaking the industrial agriculture model. Kirschenmann himself says his “Ag in the Middle” initiative aims at an “international alternative food system,” and, one farmer noted that, although Fred himself isn’t an “activist,” he’s lent his name to publications, contributed commentary to documentaries, and shared panel discussions with folks that would surely make commodity and industry groups cringe. Not to mention, Kirschenmann himself says he still follows advice he gleaned from another national leader five years ago – “The Leopold Center is an institution for change, and change doesn’t happen in centers of power. The people in power are comfortable, and don’t see a need for change. So we need to work with people on the fringe, where things aren’t working for them.” That’s scary stuff for entrenched interests.
Just one timely example? Exactly one week before the reassignment, Kirschenmann appeared at a state legislative hearing regarding genetically engineered (GE) crops, outlining research concluding GE crops are not increasing farmers’ incomes and concerns about GE contamination of organic crops. Not the kind of testimony biotech-giant Monsanto – one of the college of agriculture’s top-10 donors in fiscal year 2005, according to a list compiled by the ISU Foundation for Mother Earth last week – likes to hear.
And thanks to such potential conflicts of interest, there have been calls from the grassroots to “break the Leopold Center free” from Iowa State, a concern Kirschenmann had openly addressed with administration, asking “pointblank, is this a center of the university or a Center at the university.” So concerned about the power dynamics, he’s even gone to Paul Johnson, who helped craft the original legislation, and discovered that there were fears from the start that locating the center at Iowa State “would eventually corrupt it.”
According to a protest letter addressed to university officials circulating among activists last week, concern is mounting that Kirschenmann’s demotion is clear evidence of such corruption: “By removing Dr. Kirschenmann from this position, Iowa State University is allowing outside business interests to effectively control the agenda of a prominent American university, thereby further eroding the once unique independent status of academic institutions in American life.” And to be perfectly honest, Kirschenmann can’t say he entirely disagrees.
“This issue is not just about me or the Leopold Center,” he says. “It’s an issue about whether or not public institutions can still have intellectual pursuits without being hampered by outside pressure.”
“I’m looking forward to working with Jerry [DeWitt], but what kind of pressures he’s under in all this, I have no idea,” he adds. “I’m just going to live my way into this. But I have no intention of backing away from the mission. If can’t do that, I’ll do something else.” CV