You Know You are Getting Older When People Ask You When You Plan to Retire
Jeff Semler, UMD Extension Educator and Guest Columnist for Herald Media
Oct. 31 marked the beginning of my 37th year with Extension. In 1988, I began my career in Baltimore County, and you probably would guess I was among the youngest on staff. Today I am senior staff.
Back then, we were known as Maryland Cooperative Extension Service. The name made sense; we were extending the reach of the University by sharing research-based information with the public. We were cooperative because the Land Grant model is a funding model where USDA, the state, and the county each ponied up one-third of the funding. We were service because we served our communities.
I believe all educational entities suffer from an inferiority complex — one I have never shared, by the way. They always think they need to change titles and names to remain relevant when they only need to deliver what they promise.
Faculty were once called agents because we were agents of change who delivered cutting-edge information that changed lives at home and in the field. Today, we are called educators, and the organization is just the University of Maryland Extension. No matter my title or the organization’s name, at our core, is the Land Grant Mission, serving the community as the educational outreach arm of the University of Maryland.
Land-grant universities were first established in 1862 when President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act. This legislation gave every state not under rebellion land in the West to sell and establish colleges of agriculture and mechanics, which today we would call mechanics engineering.
These colleges were also to educate the industrial class or the working folk. Before this act, higher education was the primary domain of the wealthy.
Today many Land Grant institutions have lost their focus by not putting their colleges of agriculture at the forefront. They also have fallen into the comparison trap where university presidents boast of the average SAT score of their incoming freshmen. It seems they missed the point of giving opportunities to the educationally disadvantaged.
But I digress. I have stated more than once in this space that I am a product of the Land Grant University system. I was a 4-H member, I have two degrees from Land Grant Schools, I work for a Land Grant, and my mother was a member of the Homemakers’ Club until it folded.
This stroke of genius is the envy of the world. Extension personnel have been sharing this model in countries around the world. To that end, a colleague and I were published in the Hoard’s Dairyman Brazil edition on this very subject, recently.
I have no plans to retire soon. I enjoy my job and working with farmers and others who share my passion for agriculture. I have a great group of coworkers, and I am sold out on the Land Grant mission. As I told one of the clients one day, when asked to describe my job, I said I am an information broker. If I don’t know the answer, I will find it.
Jeff Semler is an Extension educator for the University of Maryland Extension, specializing in agriculture and natural resources. He is based in Washington County and can be reached at 301-226-7528 or by email at jsemler@umd.edu.