UC Berkeley

Agriculture colleges at Historically White Land Grant Universities (HWLGUs) were founded by selling of Indigenous land via the First Morrill Act of 1862 and still receive public funding to produce an educated workforce trained to serve each state’s agri-food system needs. Yet the HWLGU public service mission is premised on ideological/institutional and organizational logics of racism and colonization, evidenced by the ways in which their agricultural research, educational programs, and campus services create inequitable access and experiences among minoritized populations. Race-based inequities also pervade the U.S. agri-food system, across issues of labor, access, and health. In the last decade, many HWLGUs began acknowledging that their organizational logics create and uphold white supremacy. They are questioning, and seeking to address, how they perpetuate simultaneous educational and agri-food system injustices. Yet pursuing organizational change in deeply entrenched, historically-shaped agricultural colleges is complex and multi-level. Little is known about how universities are integrating anti-racism and decolonization into their everyday organizational practices and educational approaches, and about the ideas, strategies, and discourses proponents of change mobilize. Previous research has highlighted the broader discursive, cognitive, social, and organizational barriers that can impede anti-racist and decolonial change in academic culture, but little exists with regard to agricultural education. I conducted a mixed methods in-depth case study of the University of California (UC) Berkeley College of Natural Resources (CNR) to investigate how one HWLGU envisions and enacts—and inhibits—organizational change to advance anti-racism and decolonization in their agricultural education. I draw on critical and abolitionist university studies as an overarching framework, and also employ an interdisciplinary mix of critical theories that address racism and colonialism; organizational theories on inequality and change-making; and critical pedagogy of agri-food systems. My research design includes: (a) 129 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 75 individual CNR faculty, staff, students, postdoctoral scholars, and administrators; (b) interviewee identity surveys; (c) content analysis analysis of organizational artifacts; (d) critical visual examination of agricultural teaching and research spaces; and (e) critical reflexivity and critical autoethnographic practices. The case consists of four substudies that each examine different levels and processes for envisioning, enacting, and contesting organizational change. Study 1, “The First Morrill Act and Its Afterlife: Settler Conquest, White Supremacy, and the Founding of the University of California Agricultural Education,” examines the development of agricultural settler conquest and white supremacy from the beginning of the U.S. occupation of California in 1846 through the first six decades of the UC College of Agriculture. Across two chapters I analyze archival texts, secondary sources, and physical spaces to uncover CNR’s historically-specific development and entrenchment of racist and settler colonial ideologies/ institutions. Study 2, “The 2020 Racial Justice Movement and Organizational Change Possibilities in the College of Natural Resources,” provides an “ecosystem view” of ideas, discourse, and perceptions of change circulating in CNR in the 2020 context through two semi-longitudinal interviews with 45 agricultural scholars and administrators with different professional positions and personal identities. Studies 3 and 4 investigate two interventions within CNR to understand how actors mobilize change practices and counter-hegemonic discourse to try to enact anti-racism and decolonization. Study 3, “The Campus Foodscape as Praxis: Participatory Mapping, Pedagogy, and Organizational Change,” examines the six-year UC Berkeley Foodscape Mapping Project, which used the campus as a living laboratory for members to generate agri-food systems knowledge while developing programs, campaigns, and cartographic resources to advance equity. Across three chapters I analyze the ways in which a multi-year organizational change project that used pedagogical and research practices aimed at participatory, student-led learning experiences worked, and not, and what this reveals about change-making processes in CNR. Study 4, “The ‘Critical Engagements in Anti-Racist Environmental Scholarship’ Course as a Site of Organizational Change,” investigates a course developed by doctoral students during the national racial justice protests of 2020 for members of CNR’s largest department to engage in collaborative learning to deepen understandings of anti-racism in academia, and through action projects, attempt to change departmental structures and culture. The course was distinctive in that it was a learning environment that aimed to flatten traditional academic hierarchies: graduate students, faculty, staff, and postdoctoral scholars took the class together, and the teaching team consisted of doctoral students. I examine how the course cultivated an undertheorized relational and affective aspect of organizational change work which I call “feeling of community.” Previous scholarship has largely ignored racism and colonization in agricultural education, despite land grant universities’ explicit mandate to serve the public through agricultural research, education, and outreach. A large body of literature examines how higher education fails racially and otherwise minoritized communities, and while some scholars provide roadmaps to addressing racism, there are few studies of what these efforts are doing. My multi-level, thick analysis of the University of California, Berkeley, College of Natural Resources provides a rigorous understanding of the processes, agents, and constraints of change-making work. These analytical tools can be used to assess how other Historically White Land Grant University agricultural colleges approach anti-racism and decolonization, and whether their actions lead to transformative learning and change.