Abstract:
In this preliminary study, we posited that subtle but normative socio-cultural Eurocentric views held by students could tend to subvert efforts at landgrant institutions to help students become more competent to reap the opportunities of increasing globalization. We designed and administered a simple attitudinal questionnaire to a sample of freshmen and seniors (in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech, a land-grant institution) to measure the intensity of their agreement with 16 Eurocentric propositions about agriculture advanced by David Landes (Landes, 1998), a leading proponent of Eurocentric explanations of modern economic history. We found that both freshmen and seniors held eurocentric views of agriculture. Although seniors' views tended to be less intense than freshmen's, they were still far from being immune to Eurocentric socio-cultural influences. Academic exposure and/or social maturity were likely causes of the lower intensity of seniors' views. We think that students' Eurocentric views on agriculture are probably associated with socio-cultural conditioning embedded historically by precept and example in the (essentially neo-European) North American psyche as proposed by Hughes (2003). More comprehensive and in-depth surveys are needed to better characterize the origins and intensity of Eurocentric socio-cultural views and how such views may impact graduates' global competency.
Keywords:
Eurocentric views, agriculture, students, land-grant, survey, Persaud, Parrish, Wang, Muffo