Donnybrook Farm : 40 Years Later, Pierce College’s War Over Agricultural Program Still Rages
“I am sitting here trying to study for finals, and I am finding it more and more difficult. You see, when I started Pierce College. . . . I was excited and eager to learn and meet new people with similar interests. Instead, I found I walked into some kind of a time bomb. A war is going on that I do not understand, but I, along with many other students, am asked to not only face this war, but somehow choose a side.”
From letter Leslie Forsyth, an agriculture major, sent to The Times.
It’s been called a war. A messy divorce. And even Farmgate.
Teachers walking down the shabby hallway of the agriculture department at Pierce College can feel the tension in this place where one controversy after another has calcified the farm faculty into two stubborn camps, and inevitably drawn students and the community into the debate.
Like smokers who know they should quit, the teachers realize that their bickering could endanger the school’s 250-acre farm, but they can’t stop.
“I can’t see it ending,” lamented Mick Sears, the agriculture department chairman, who keeps on his desk a can of “BS repellent” that he got at a faculty Christmas party. “The lines have been crossed, the trenches have been dug too deeply. The animosity is too strong.”
The Three Musketeers
“We don’t talk to each other in the department,” acknowledged animal science professor Ed Boggess who, along with two other agriculture teachers, have been affectionately named the Three Musketeers by some students. “It’s their side and it’s our side.”
At its core, the faculty is arguing an issue that was first raised more than 40 years ago when Dr. Clarence W. Pierce, an extroverted physician-turned-mortician, cajoled skeptics into believing an agriculture school was needed in the San Fernando Valley. The same question is even more relevant today: Can enough city kids be lured into studying agriculture?
For decades, Pierce agriculture professors have worried that someday the administration is going to decide the answer is no.
“There is always apprehension that change will eventually lead to the abolition of the program,” said Herbert W. Ravetch, Pierce president from 1979 to 1985. “Even a small change can awaken that fear.”
The latest round of anxiety began in 1986 when college President David Wolf insisted on resuscitating the moribund agriculture program, which offered one of the least popular and most expensive disciplines on campus.
Eventually, a decision was made to invest more money in the most popular of the agriculture curriculum--horticulture, horse care and veterinary-related classes--and offer fewer of the traditional farm classes on cows, sheep and hogs. Barnyard flocks were reduced to save money, and some faculty members were reassigned to lengthy research projects when less popular classes were cut back.
The shake-up triggered disharmony among the 11-member faculty. On the one side were three faculty members--the Three Musketeers--whose classroom numbers were dwindling. Most of the other faculty members were teaching classes that were favored under the reorganization.
Today, the simmering dispute seems to have scotched any chance of the faculty agreeing on anything--big or small.
Should the San Fernando Valley Fair be allowed to move to the Pierce farm? They can’t agree.
Should the department give its blessing to a developer who wants to build high-rises on the college’s outskirts in return for possible perks for the farm? They can’t agree.
Should an equestrian center be built on campus, and, if so, which plan is best? Hopelessly split again.
They even argue about who gets dibs on a private faculty bathroom.
In this battle, guerrilla tactics are common.
Both sides, for instance, wage their fight on the department’s bulletin boards by tacking up caustic messages and newspaper articles highlighted in yellow magic marker. When the campus newspaper recently blamed two of the Three Musketeers for the farm’s troubles, copies of the editorials appeared on the bulletin boards almost immediately.
Professor Boggess was enraged. One of the offending editorials was on his bulletin board, which he assumed would be safe behind a locked glass case. He queried Sears about who had access to the key and put up another copy of the editorial with his own comments typed on the side: “Tried--Convicted--Hung by WHOM? Is this not adding fuel. . . . “
None of the teachers owned up, but after lunch one day, three teachers walked past the editorials giggling.
A short time later Jim Bachman, who teaches the cattle production classes, reportedly staggered into the equine-studies’ instructors’ office laughing. “Tried, convicted and hung. That’s hysterical!”
Leland Shapiro, a dairy professor and another of the Musketeers, complained that, after the editorial appeared, many students dropped his classes in horse studies.
“I felt like I’m in a war zone,” Shapiro lamented. “It’s a very horrible feeling to walk in a room and say hello to faculty I’ve known for 17 years who used to be good friends who won’t even acknowledge me.”
He blames the faculty or the staff for pranks played against him. Arriving at his office recently, he found glue and toothpicks stuck in his door lock. Another morning, the alarm on his clock radio, which he never sets, was blaring away, annoying the secretary across the hall.
The trio say they feel betrayed by their colleagues, and they see Wolf as the mastermind of a conspiracy to eventually banish most barnyard animals and carve up the farm.
A critical point in the dispute is class enrollment figures the administration has used to justify the department’s spring cleaning.
A Mountain of Documents
That’s why the third member of the trio, Richard Skidmore, an agri-business professor who teaches the department’s smallest classes, regularly peppers Wolf and other administrators with memos and runs computer programs to dispute class-size figures and other statistics. He’s amassed a mountain of documents, some of which he hauled in a plastic milk crate to a meeting with a reporter.
Skidmore accuses his peers of steering students away from his classes and says they are “distant, rude, vicious, vindictive.” Showing his disdain for the popular equine courses, he calls the horses “hay burners.”
Lynn Wechsler, who teaches the equine classes along with her husband, Ron, has no patience for the Three Musketeers. The Wechlers belong to the majority of the faculty who think the three teachers are rabble rousers who are jeopardizing the department’s future.
“They are unwilling to try something new,” she sniffed. “They will fight you tooth and nail. I suspect they are afraid.”
While the faculty fumes, students are avoiding politicized agriculture classes, neighborhood groups have entered the fray and Arthur Bronson, a longtime farm supporter on the Los Angeles Community College District’s board is warning that the faculty “jolly well better” stop arguing and modernize its curriculum if it expects to keep the farm intact.
Some students, hearing teachers’ gripes in certain classes, have taken sides. And they’ve become demoralized as rumors of the farm’s demise bounce around campus like Ping-Pong balls.
Doomed Dairy Program?
In January, some students burst into tears when Shapiro told his dairy class that the dairy barn was going to close.
Wolf has adamantly denied that the dairy is doomed. Shapiro, who now says he probably should have kept quiet, blamed Wolf for the misinformation.
Actually, the dairy closure was an old rumor. Last year, angry students, hoping to save the dairy, had threatened to march all the dairy cows to President Wolf’s office for a powwow.
A few students organized forums to explore divisive issues and extracted a promise from the board to investigate why hundreds of bulletins advertising one of the forums was held up in the campus mail. After conducting an investigation, Wolf said the mail delay was an innocent mistake, but he recommended changes in the campus mail-handling procedures.
They offer their opinions in newsletters with names such as “The Tattler” and “The Buck Stops Where?” and at least one student apparently even advises her teachers on how to deal with the press.
Last week, when a Times photographer was walking down the hallway in the agriculture building, LeAnna McGuire, a longtime Pierce student, asked if he was from the newspaper. She said she had told the Three Musketeers to avoid having their pictures taken.
Most students have tried to stay out of the fight. “I can’t trust anything I’m hearing,” complained Leslie Forsyth, a freshman who hopes someday to become an animal researcher. “The school is destroying itself.”
“I got so sick of the politics, I’m taking a minimum amount of ag classes,” said Kim Schardt, 19, a dairy science major. “How much politics can they bring into a tractor class?” she asked.
On the surface, the teachers would seem to share a lot more in common than their cramped offices in the former poultry building, where feathers and chicken odors are trapped in the attic. Below, professors work in partitioned offices while flies buzz in the cool hallways and dogs occasionally stroll through.
Most teachers are salt-of-the-earth types who love the outdoors and pickup trucks. Their hands are rough and suntanned, and the only thing that distinguishes their blue jean wardrobes is their belt buckles.
Their cubbyholes exude folksiness. A stuffed coyote rests on a filing cabinet, a horse-studies instructor’s visitors sit on a horseshoe chair, and petrified cow piles and bleached skulls are a popular decorating touch. Talking-animal cartoons--especially from the “Far Side” strip--are tacked on bulletin boards, doors and desks all over the stucco building with aquamarine doors.
But, with so many hard feelings incubating in the old barn, it’s a strange place to work.
Eavesdropping is rampant, or so nearly everyone thinks. It’s not a hard feat since the flimsy walls can’t even muffle the sound of a dialing telephone.
Unsolicited Responses
One day, when Sears couldn’t remember the location of a community college that had just closed its agriculture program, he raised his voice slightly to ask the teacher in the next room for help.
“Hey, Ron, where’s Hartnell College?”
From elsewhere in the building, two or three people blurted out, “Salinas.”
Sears grinned at the unsolicited responses. When private conversations are necessary, he noted, “I go somewhere else.”
Sears assumes some of his conversations are recorded. He claims that once, in the middle of a conversation, he heard a tape recorder apparently buried under a teacher’s clothing click off. Another time, a recorder fell out of a teacher’s pocket.
Sears accused Skidmore of wielding the tape recorder. But Skidmore denies secretly taping anyone, though he readily admitted, during an interview he tape-recorded, that he openly tapes a lot.
Why tape? To explain, Skidmore recalled the experiences of presidential hopeful Pat Robertson who denied saying seemingly outlandish things until tapes were produced that had captured his words.
“It would fall into the same category,” Skidmore said, who noted you can’t refute something on tape.
Suckers for Farm’s Charm
The antagonism momentarily melts away when the teachers talk about why they stay. Everybody, it seems, is a sucker for the farm’s charm. In the shadows of the Warner Center high-rises, visitors who walk down the rutted dirt roads past the swine barn, the dairy, the rows of alfalfa and the rolling pastures can almost believe they are not in Los Angeles anymore.
The teachers’ loyalty seems all the more tenacious because the farm is no longer a shiny monument to agriculture. The fences are falling down, the temporary horse corral built with scrap materials 17 years ago still hasn’t been replaced and some of the tractors were manufactured before American troops landed in Normandy. The decrepit sheep barn, a lunch room donated by an elementary school decades ago, becomes flooded every year.
In the past, when the faculty has felt the farm was threatened, they’ve united. It was not too long ago, the teachers recall fondly, when they put on T-shirts that said “Cows Not Condos” and scared off a developer who planned to build condominiums on the rim of the farm.
“We were a real close faculty,” lamented Boggess, whose love affair with the school began as a child when his father, the school’s original instructor in sheep studies, brought him to work.
Bronson, who became a trustee in 1971 because he loved the Pierce farm, is tired of the escapades and watching the farm deteriorate. He’s discouraged that the farm’s milk now has to be sent out for pasteurizing, that the sweet corn is planted and harvested by a private farmer and that his suggestions for modernizing have been ignored. He grumbles that, when he suggested that a fish farm be started after he visited one in China, someone simply threw a few fish in the hog pond.
The turmoil down on the Pierce farm has come full circle.
The anxiety has existed since the college opened in 1947, according to a yellowed dissertation locked up for the past 20 years in the college’s tiny archives. Robert Morris McHargue, a former Pierce teacher and later a district administrator, shed some light on the paranoia when he wrote his doctoral dissertation at UCLA in the 1960s.
Hardly anyone was enthusiastic about creating an agricultural school in the Valley except Pierce, one of the city’s civic titans. But Pierce and his friends outmaneuvered the critics with tenacious lobbying.
At one point, the supporters of the agricultural program even talked about bringing the skeptics to the Valley on a train to be entertained by a band of train robbers, cowboys and Indians. They eventually settled on an elaborate barbecue, while rumors persisted that the board members were bribed with fresh turkeys.
When the board finally approved the school, panic set in. Supporters promised the board that several hundred students would enroll. On the first day, there were fewer than 70.
“It was a point of anxiety the morning we opened the school,” one longtime administrator told McHargue. “Would we close down at the end of the day? Would we have no students? . . . I think the night before we opened Pierce was the roughest that I’ve ever experienced in my life.”
