Agriculture Dept.’s Open Campus Offers Low-Cost Adult Classes

There are no ivy-covered walls or homecoming dances at a popular but largely invisible college the Department of Agriculture has been running quietly here for nearly 70 years.

“One of the big jokes I’ve heard is that our football team has never lost a game,” joked Dr. Philip Hudson, director of the USDA Graduate School, the only U.S. government educational institution of its kind.

The longstanding affiliation with the Agriculture Department could be misleading. You won’t find classes filled with farmers in bib overalls studying how to raise prize-winning squashes or build a state-of-the-art tool shed. The Graduate School offers low-cost instruction in 1,000 courses, ranging from computer sciences to bird-watching, to anyone 18 or older who walks in the door.

Many of the 40,000 students are federal bureaucrats seeking to upgrade their skills so they can qualify for promotions, but the school also attracts a fair share of Washington suburbanites in pursuit of avocations.

The school was established in 1921 by a former secretary of agriculture, Henry C. Wallace, for the purpose of after-hours graduate training of department’s research scientists, many of whom had been leaving for better-paying jobs in private industry.

Since 176 students showed up for the first day of classes in science, economics and statistics on Oct. 17, 1921, in the Agriculture Department building on the Mall, the Graduate School has produced a million or so alumni.

Although most have been anonymous toilers in the bureaucracy, one of the most famous among them is Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White.

As a young Navy officer on temporary duty in Washington in 1945, White got his first exposure to the legal profession from a Graduate School course in administrative law. He later entered Yale Law School.

In the early 1960s, when White was a deputy attorney general in the John F. Kennedy Administration, he returned to the Graduate School for a “reading improvement” course. He recalled that it was “quite good” and urged his Justice Department colleagues to enroll.

The school’s international division provided training in public administration for officials from the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) when that African country became independent in 1960. Next April, courtesy of the U.S. Information Agency, a dozen judges from the Soviet Union will take courses on the American legal system at the Graduate School.

The curriculum has something for nearly every taste. It is heavy on advanced technical courses but also offers exotic choices such as introductory Swahili, the German novella, mushroom cultivation and assertiveness training for both men and women.

Instruction is offered in daytime seminars, correspondence courses and evening and weekend sessions in rented classroom space around the city. Lectures are given in scattered government buildings, at local high schools, in a private office building, the National Arboretum and the National Audubon Society’s wooded estate in suburban Maryland.

The faculty consists of 700 part-time teachers, many of them retired government officials, private professionals and professors from local colleges and universities. Two-thirds of the students already have bachelor’s degrees or better, but there are no minimum education requirements for enrollment.

The Graduate School is a nonprofit, $10-million-a-year enterprise that doesn’t receive a penny of public funds. It is supported entirely by tuition fees, which average $150 for the equivalent of a two-credit college course.

“It’s a bargain,” says Hudson, 47, who has been director since 1985. “In a sense, we have to have the heart and soul of a public servant and the reflexes of an entrepreneur to keep it afloat.”

Although the school doesn’t grant degrees, credits earned in 275 of its 1,000 courses have been recommended by the American Council on Education for transfer to regularly accredited colleges and universities.

Hudson said the Graduate School probably will never have an ivy-walled campus of its own, and for good reason.

“We very much want to operate as a college without walls, and to be out there where the customers live and work,” he said.