rural

President Trump’s distaste for “political correctness” has deeply resonated with many Americans, especially in rural communities. In a recent interview for Vox, Robert Wuthnow — a sociologist who spent eight years interviewing members of small, rural communities across the country — argues that resentment in predominantly White, rural towns is less a reflection of economic woes and more a response to threatening cultural and demographic changes.

Rural Americans tend to direct their frustration from adjusting to changing economic and social conditions at lawmakers, who they believe are seizing their resources and giving them to big cities. Many discussed cultural shifts and a “moral decline.” For example, one resident felt like the government was taking away their personal control over their lives because they can’t “spank [their] children without ‘the government’ intervening.” Further, Wuthnow describes how growing diversity in the United States threatens many rural Americans’ Christian, white-normative, and heteronormative lifestyles, resulting in rising White nationalism movements, like the Alt-right.

As the country changes and their kids leave to find work in urban centers, White rural Americans feel they are being left behind. But instead of dismissing them, Wuthnow argues that we should try to understand their perspectives. He concludes,

“Rural America does have real problems — population decline, a brain drain, opioid addiction, etc. We can make of that what we want. But that’s not the whole picture. Not every small town is full of people who are suffering and bitter and angry at Washington…[And while] there are significant differences between small towns and large cities,…there are also commonalities. Since we’re living in a polarized time, it’s worth remembering that not all divisions run along the rural-urban divide.”

With the annual state fair season approaching nationwide, the Des Moines Register reports on the status of county fairs in Iowa, a rural state where the kids just don’t farm like they used to.

The challenge:

Keeping youth engaged in old-fashioned farm fun in the digital age, a time when kids may be more enticed by Farmville on Facebook than by a 4-H project with hogs.

Apparently, even tech-savvy teens aren’t immune to the lure of tradition:

Although the Iowa State Fair, which opens Thursday in Des Moines, typically attracts more than a million visitors, the county fairs have survived as an important cultural attraction in part because they are the largest event of the year for many communities, Tucker said.

Fried foods, giant stuffed teddy bears and bandstand acts connect people across generations who seek an alternative to movies and video games.

“It’s a unique marriage of entertainment and education,” Tucker said. “There’s a long tradition of people attending fairs with parents, grandparents.”

A sociologist interprets:

In that way, the fairs serve as an extended family reunion, said Paul Lasley, an Iowa State University sociology professor.

“Fairs have evolved,” Lasley said. “But the basis of social interaction, neighboring, seeing your old friends, that’s still an important part of them.

“It’s these connections that keep the county fairs going. Connections to the past, but also connections to the future.”

But shifting trends in youth participation are impacting more traditional fair activities:

A decline in Iowa youth participation concerns some because the county fairs make celebrating the accomplishments of children a core part of the mission.

The number of youth showing livestock at county fairs last year was down 9 percent from 2008, according to Association of Iowa Fairs statistics. The number of youth showing nonlivestock projects was down 3 percent, data showed.

However, the youths who participated were more active. The number of livestock and nonlivestock exhibits was up slightly in 2009.

Such changes in demographics and participation are prompting some fair organizers to innovate.  Marshalltown, Iowa provides one example:

Polt said few from Marshalltown’s sizable Hispanic population participate, despite the role of county fairs in celebrating a community’s culture and heritage.

“We have to find avenues of bringing them in and letting them know we want them to be part of our fair,” he said.

Holding the fair on Sundays would allow Hispanic parents, many of whom work six days a week, to attend on a day traditionally set aside to spend with family, he said.

“You can’t keep catering to the same old crowd,” he said. “Your crowd’s getting younger. Generations change.”

With political representation and federal funding at stake, Midwestern states are showing the highest Census response rates so far. According to the New York Times:

With Thursday dubbed Census Day — the day the questionnaires are meant to capture as a snapshot — South Dakota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, North Dakota and Iowa are ranked the top five states by federal officials, because they have the highest participation rates in the census so far. People can send in the forms until mid-April, but the Midwest’s cooperativeness might rightly worry other regions.

After all, the census guides the federal government on decisions with lasting impact — like how many representatives states will have in Congress and how much federal money they win for their roads.

But the high rates of participation in these rural states may have less to do with vying for power and resources and more to do with social norms and sensibilities.

Census officials said lots of social factors seemed to correlate to a community’s responsiveness (or silence) to the census mailings. Places where people stay put, for instance, often answer. In this town, most people said they had grown up here.

But some North Dakotans, where the state capital, Bismarck, had the nation’s fourth-highest response rate among larger cities as of Wednesday night, suggested a simpler answer. Perhaps it was the way of thinking around here — some combination, they said, of being practical, orderly, undistracted and mostly accepting of the rules, whatever they are. “We have a high degree of trust in our elected officials,” said Curt Stofferahn, a rural sociologist at the University of North Dakota, “and that carries over to times like these.”

The towns and cities the census described this week as having 100 percent participation rates are mostly tiny. How hard, some wondered, is it to get 50 responses from 50 people? And in Wolford, which officially has a 100 percent rate, plenty of people — perhaps more than 20 — are not included in that statistic because they hold post office boxes and have yet to receive forms.

By all appearances, these norms are being passed along to the next generation of rural residents.

At Wolford Public School, where 46 children from around the area attend kindergarten through 12th grade (the ninth grade is empty and only one child is in fourth grade), census leaflets, posters and stickers have been handed out in Wanda Follman’s class of 11 children.

Asked on Wednesday if their families had returned census forms yet, nearly all 11 shot their hands in the air. The children excitedly recited some of the questions from memory.

“I filled it out with my mom’s help,” said Kyle Yoder, the 8-year-old, who wore glasses and a serious face. “It was kind of easy.”

Agriculture Online reports results from the Farm and Rural Life Poll, an annual survey of Iowa farmers conducted by Extension Sociology at Iowa State University.

The latest [survey] indicates concerns are growing surrounding the passage of farms to the next generation. In the 2008 poll, 42% of farmers responding said they were planning on retiring in the next 5 years, and among those, 56% said they had identified a successor, according to J. Gordon Arbuckle, Jr., leader of a team of ISU Extension sociologists administering the poll.

The survey explores what the farmers think motivates their children to take on the family farm:

“The 735 farmers who were over 55 — approaching retirement age — had 350 children who farmed, a proportion (48%) that represents less than half of the number that will be needed to replace the current generation of farmers as they retire,” he adds.

Of those saying the younger generation planned to take the reins of the farm, reasons like quality of life and love of farming topped the list of motivations.

“Following in importance were quality of life considerations and having grown up wanting to farm. Seventy-two percent of farmers rated these factors as having been important or very important criteria in their children’s decisions to farm,” Arbuckle says. “Ability to be their own boss (68%), desire to stay close to home (56%), desire to carry on family tradition (55%), and family ability to help get them started (55%) were also rated as important or very important by a majority of Farm Poll participants.”

Why are members of the next generation planning on other careers instead of returning to the farm? Arbuckle says income opportunities elsewhere comprised the top motivator, while industry entrance hurdles like input costs, high land rents and excessive overall financial risk topped the list of drivers toward other careers.

“In contrast to the factors influencing the decision to farm, most of the reasons that were rated as most important in the choice of a non-farm career were economic,” Arbuckle says.

“On the whole, results suggest that for those individuals who chose farming as their career, cultural and lifestyle factors were the predominant reasons underlying that choice. Whether regarding their own decisions to farm, or their children”s decisions, love of farming and quality of life issues were fundamental,” he continues. “On the other hand, for those children who did not choose to farm, parents’ assessments clearly point to economic factors as the most important decision criteria, whether in the form of economic barriers to farm entry or better income opportunities elsewhere.”

Check out the site for “The Farm Poll” for great summary reports of surveys dating back to 1982.

The Des Moines Register recently discussed rural Iowans’ efforts to combat the problem of population loss as their young adults relocate to bigger cities, as well as the difficulties faced by those who stay close to home:

Iowans have made countless efforts to stop the state’s rural population drain. Former Gov. Tom Vilsack recruited former Iowans and welcomed immigrants. Groups worked to gussy up Main Street for a kind of nostalgic small-town tourism. Conference attendees listened to speakers who touted attracting a young, creative class of artists and entrepreneurs. Experts waited for the telecommuters who never came. Economic development officials hustled for small manufacturing plants that sometimes didn’t pay much.

The article includes sociological commentary on the fates of the “stayers”:

They are ignored, maybe even pitied when you see them in the grocery, and yet they are the very future of the town, say Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas, a husband-wife sociologist team who moved from Philadelphia to Iowa for several months to write “Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America.”

They identified a group of citizens they labeled “the stayers” who were not often encouraged by teachers or parents to attend college, worked through school to buy a pickup truck, and became invisible to the town’s more moneyed and educated classes.

“They are taken for granted, as in the story of the prodigal son,” said Kefalas, a St. Joseph’s University sociology professor who interviewed nearly 300 young people in a northeast Iowa town they chose to keep anonymous. “They don’t work as hard investing in them and just assume the old way of life will somehow work out for them.”

Part of the problem is that secondary education in America is focused on preparing kids to go to college:

“Those that have the ability go off. That makes a lot of sense as a community or a school. You don’t want to hold them back,” said high school counselor Diane Stegge. “But at the same time, you are taking them away from the community.”

Kefalas said schools should do more to prepare students who have a desire to stay or don’t have the money or abilities for college. Many are too busy catering to the high achievers.

“Teachers in Ellis (the pseudonym for the town in the book) were offended by our portrayal. But I’m a teacher, and it’s much more fun to teach those above grade level,” she said. “The challenge is how you make your school work for everyone.”

One rural Iowa school board member sums up the consequences for small towns of ignoring their average students:

“The ones with higher education, we know there is going to be nothing here for them,” he said. “We also try to focus on those with special needs. But the middle-of-the-road ones are going to become our community.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story today about the proposed elimination of the rural and community sociology program at Washington State University.

The justification for the cuts are as follows:

As colleges and universities struggle through the nation’s economic downturn, most are trying to preserve both academic programs and tenured faculty jobs. When it comes to saving money, universities are laying off staff members, freezing future faculty hiring, imposing furloughs, and trimming operating expenses. Some are merging academic departments, but few are eliminating them outright.

Besides theater and dance, Washington State also wants to get rid of the German major and the department of community and rural sociology. It figures the cuts will save $3.6-million over the next two years. In documents justifying the cuts, officials said professors in theater have too little time for research and that those in community and rural sociology bring in little money for research. Rural sociology has no undergraduate majors, and German awarded only four degrees in 2008. The theater program, administrators said, lacks “visibility and impact.”

But…

The university may have underestimated the outpouring of support for some of the programs it wants to scrap. Scholars have staged a national letter-writing campaign on behalf of the rural-sociology department, and in May students in theater and dance conducted a silent march across the campus to the president’s office.

The Chronicle featured commentary from some Washington State University sociologists:

Annabel R. Kirschner, a full professor in community and rural sociology, is just three years away from her planned retirement. Closing academic programs and laying off tenured faculty, she says, are dramatic steps for a university to take. “I’m concerned it will reflect on the prestige of the university for many years to come,” she says. Besides, Ms. Kirschner believes the action just wasn’t necessary. “If they had done a 10-percent cut across the board,” she says, “there wouldn’t be a need to terminate tenured faculty.” Mr. Bayly [the University Provost], however, says the university already tried that approach, making across-the-board reductions totaling between 2 percent and 5 percent in about 10 of the last 15 years. It wasn’t enough, he says.

José L. García-Pabón has taught in the community and rural sociology department at Washington State for only two years. His position is unique: He is the university’s first Latino community-development specialist. He works with Latino farmers on agriculture and health issues, and on literacy issues with the Latino population in general. Latinos are the fastest-growing minority group in the state. “If I’m gone,” he adds, “I don’t think anyone’s going to continue to do these kinds of things.”

Read more.

Inside Higher Education reports this week on the rapidly disappearing rural sociology programs at universities around the country. They report that rural sociologists are now combined with other social science departments in many land grant universities. Inside Higher Education notes, “many professors in the field say that they have seen a slow erosion in support and expertise as retiring professors in these departments are replaced with sociologists who focus on other areas.”

Sociologists have been up in arms about the disappearing field in recent weeks…

These concerns [about putting rural sociology programs in other departments] are nothing compared to the anger that has spread through the rural sociology world in the last few weeks, however, as word spread that Washington State University wasn’t planning to merge its rural sociology program with another unit, but to simply eliminate it.

That a land grant university would simply abolish the discipline — and in particular a rare freestanding program that is well respected nationally — stunned rural sociologists. Many have come to expect that sociology departments (general ones) will be more occupied with issues of criminology and sexuality and suburban youth than with aging populations in rural towns or the new immigration that is changing those communities.

The Rural Sociological Society issued a statement on Washington State’s plan:

“We are deeply concerned for the personal welfare of the department’s faculty members and staff, but we also believe that this action sends a powerful negative message to the land grant university system that applied research and outreach focused on problems and opportunities experienced by rural people and communities is expendable,” says an advertisement published in two newspapers in Washington State Friday and signed by the president, president-elect and 19 past presidents of the Rural Sociological Society.

Rural sociologist Kenneth Pigg comments:

“There aren’t very many rural sociology programs around. There’s a general perception that rural doesn’t matter anymore. Whenever financial problems arise and administrators get a little touchy about how they are going to manage budgets, this is the sort of thing that happens,” said Kenneth Pigg, a rural sociologist at the University of Missouri at Columbia, one institution that still has a freestanding program.

Pigg said that social sciences were once viewed as central to the land grant mission — that departments of rural sociology (or agriculture economics) were applying research to help rural communities. “Now, with the emphasis on life sciences generally, you don’t see that at a lot of universities,” he said. Pigg’s work currently focuses on the impact of technological change in rural areas. While many have said that the Internet is “a savior” for rural life, Pigg said that there’s not nearly enough attention paid to the impact it has and the lack of real access to technology of many people outside of urban areas.

He said that there is nothing theoretically wrong with having rural sociology as part of other departments, but that the discipline in its entirety doesn’t pay much attention. A list of sections of the American Sociological Association includes on on urban sociology, but nothing specifically on rural areas. And while there is a section on animals and society, paper and book topics there appear more focused on pets than on farms.

Read more from Inside Higher Ed.

Forbes Magazine reports on a new study by a sociologist out of the University of Nebraska, which suggests that in a shifting economy and a waning rural population, people are changing the way they do business. Forbes reports, “Randy Cantrell, with the university’s Rural Initiative, says in most rural counties, between 18 percent and 30 percent or more of jobs are now due to self-employment. And, that accounts for virtually all job growth in rural areas.”

Cantrell believes the popularity of self-employment is on the rise.

As rural areas continue to see their population numbers fall, Cantrell says he expects that to put pressure on employers to shift away from the traditional way of doing business and rely on private contractors.

Cantrell details the phenomenon in a new report based on 2007 census data and other federal statistics.

Read more…