Ag Schooled

Fences

By luck of the draw, Robert McDowell was my first advisor, guarding the gateway into ag school. Thin, taut, dry as jerky with a reputation to match, he was a straight up animal scientist, specializing in Tropical Livestock. In Animal Science, Tropical Livestock meant cattle, since since pigs, sheep, and poultry were dealt with in their own courses, without finer distinction by climate zone.  Two weeks into my first semester, as required, I made my way to his office in the bowels of Morrison to get my schedule approved. 

Nothing in his office suggested any affinity for the outdoors, tropical or otherwise, much less for living things: windowless, airless, bare, and cramped, he’d set his desk to face the wall while he worked, with one gunmetal gray folding chair on the side for visitors. The desk was cleared of everything but a closed manila folder — presumably mine — precisely aligned with the edge. I sat, and handed over the schedule I’d planned. Without preamble pleasantries, he took it and mumbled down the list — Dairy 101, Nutrition, Organic Chem —  then stopped, braced his elbows on the desk, and raised the form to squint level. “What’s this Anthropology and African Studies?” he snapped. “They’re not pre-vet.”  This seemed easy to fix. “I’m not pre-vet.” He slapped the form back down and opened my folder.

One look confirmed my roots deep in the sidewalks of New York. I was female, dark-haired, and brown-eyed, probably even Jewish, obviously not there to upgrade the family farm or grow a fledgling feed business. So I must be one of that small but growing number of girls who loved dogs and wanted to be a vet. I saw it coming before it hit, read the question as easily as a scrolling marquee across his bony, sunburnt forehead. I’d heard it before, belligerent and chastising. “No?” he said. “Then what are you doing here in the Ag school?”

What, indeed? I’d first applied four years earlier, from a 5000-student high school steadily clawing its way up the city’s worst-schools list. I lived in a housing project next to the El, 225^th street on the IRT, in a 15-story brick building where you trick-or-treated by floor and avoided the stairs.

At the Cornell application interview, mandatory in those days, the interviewer — I remember him as thick and suited — leaned his bulk over the desk toward me and snorted, “What’s a girl from the Bronx doing applying to the Ag school?” I should have prepped for the question. My school had no guidance counselors. My parents had fixed on City College. I was 16-years old. All I knew was my grades were good and I wanted to be a game warden. 

This was based on little knowledge of what game wardens actually do, but it came from the heart. Every summer my New York City born and bred father used his carefully hoarded vacation days to cart wife and three kids to a cabin on an island in Lake Placid, six weeks in the Adirondacks, no stores, no cars, all supplies brought in by boat. My father and I spent our days sorting animal tracks, uncovering nests, and picking berries, fishing brook trout from the streams and rainbows from the lake. There, my book-bound father, the gleeful archivist for the City of New York who thrilled with every discovery of old papers, morphed into an equally enthusiastic naturalist. Gutting fish for dinner was a delightful exploration. Look, he’d show me, working a black lump out of the stomach with the tip of his knife, this is what they’re eating now. He’d pick it apart before tossing the rest of the innards. That night he’d tie a mimic in feathers and thread to float downstream the next day. Any junk fish we caught we buried in the garden. Indian fertilizer, he said. They put it under the corn.

Those weeks fed my soul the rest of the year and fueled my childhood dream: defending the big game I’d seen only at the Museum of Natural History. I’d imprinted on the African Mammal dioramas, knew every plaque and background scene, read all I could about habitats, geographies, histories, the tribes of the areas. Majoring in animal science and forestry at Cornell seemed a way to get there. 

 “I want to be a game warden,” I told the interviewer. He looked at me. No encouraging grunt, no ‘go on’ smile. “So, I have a lot to learn.” Nothing. I tried acknowledging my limitations. “I mean, I haven’t picked it up in the playground.” Silence. I froze like a roach when the lights go on. Finally, he took a long inhale. “A lot of, um…” He stopped, groping for what, I couldn’t even guess. Another sigh; he got it out.  “A lot of…unconventional students apply to the Ag school thinking it’s easier to get into than the Arts college.” He revved up. “They apply to Ag, then try to transfer. It’s not easier, it’s a waste of everyone’s time. And you can’t just get in thinking you’ll pay Ag school tuition,” he rolled on, “then take all your courses over in Arts. Kids try it all the time. It’s wrong, it’s dishonest.”  What was he talking about? Differences between colleges? What wasn’t I supposed to do? I stuttered some denial. He scolded another few minutes. I concentrated on looking mature and unperturbed. 

Four months later, the rejection noted they had “a limited amount of dorm space for females.” By summer I’d moved to a studio on West 74^th Street, living off a lowly job at the Parks Department headquarters at the edge of the Central Park Zoo, writing press releases, annual reports, and articles for the Parks newsletter. From my desk, I watched the bears and big cats pace in their cages ranged around the seal pond, saw keepers feed the carnivores and flip herring to the seals. Once I got to touch a young elephant. Shockingly, she was covered in black hair, soft as down. That was as close as I ever came to big game in Africa. Dreams of the bush faded into the mechanics of life.

Now, years later, in a fluorescent-lit office in Morrison Hall, I heard that almost-reasonable question laced with the same hostility I’d heard the first time around. Not “What do you want to study?” but “What are you doing here?” as though I were out of bounds, illegitimate. I had a more credible answer this time. “I want to work in international development, with small farmers, around food production. I need the basics. Anthropology and African Studies. I want to work in Africa.”

He had no patience for this. Tropical ag was his métier. He’d built his career on cattle diseases, spent years at equatorial research stations, taught for decades, and became a minor expert on the tsetse fly, all without benefit of anthropological insights.

“Well,” he sneered, “You’re straddling the fence between arts and ag. You can’t do it. You have to choose.”

Arts and ag, again, separated worlds not to be bridged.

“I applied twice to get in here, got rejected, came back, did prerequisites. Doesn’t that show that I chose?” He signed off.

I behaved, and kept to the ag quad, until I returned years later as a grad student who had begun to see the problems of too many fences.