Articles
POMOLOGICAL EDUCATION IN NORTH AMERICA
In the United States the American Pomology Society grew out of a national convention of fruit growers held in New York on October 19, 1848 "to promote pomology and the sciences upon which it depends." The American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS), originally formed in 1903, was in a sense a breakaway organization but it was initiated by a pomologist, Professor Spencer A. Beach.
Since its inception about half of the presidents of ASHS have been pomologists.
Pomological papers have always represented major part of ASHS journals.
Horticulture has traditionally been divided into fruits, vegetables, and ornamentals and a case can be made that in the trinity of horticulture, pomology has been the holy spirit!
Agricultural higher education in the United States traces its beginning to the Morrill Act of 1862 when public lands were sold to provide funds to establish Colleges of Agriculture and the Mechanical Arts.
As a result of this remarkable piece of legislation, every state eventually created a College of Agriculture and most have developed into major research universities.
In these new Colleges of Agriculture, Horticulture became one of the early departments but in subsequent years, Colleges of Agriculture whose state had a small horticultural industry began to merge Horticulture and other crop areas into Crop Science or Plant Science Departments and this trend continues.
For example, in 1994 the Horticulture Department at Ohio State University merged with Agronomy as part of a downsizing program and a similar merger took place at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in 1993. Horticulture will become part of Plant Science at McGill University in Canada.
Clearly, if this trend continues, Horticulture is threatened as a separate Agricultural Department in academia.
Horticulture has always been a significant part of agricultural enrollment in the United States, but numbers have fluctuated widely in the last 25 years (Fig. 1). There was a remarkable increase in the decade of the 1970s based on increasing student populations plus what appears to be a spin off of the environmental movement.
The counterculture of the late 1960s affected many students and many so-called "hippies" wishing to return to the land and simpler ways chose agriculture and horticulture as college options.
This was a national trend and Horticulture Departments were literally inundated with students.
In the decade of the 1980s the trend declined as steeply as it had risen.
In retrospect, this precipitous decline was a reflection of the agricultural depression that hit the United States.
Declining agricultural prices and farm foreclosures led to lower opportunities for the expanded population of agricultural graduates at the same time engineering and business administration students had increasingly attractive offers.
US university graduates opted for law and medicine rather than graduate school and foreign graduate students replaced domestic students in agriculture and science.
Agriculture no longer seemed to be "in" for the go-go 1980s.
The decline reached its nadir at the end of the decade, but has now reversed course.
The intensity of the current trend is uncertain.
Although horticulture enrollment is now stable or increasing, most students who enroll in Horticulture Departments are no longer interested in the traditional production areas of fruit, vegetable, or floral crops.
Rather, their interest is concentrated in the broad area of landscape horticulture.
The reason for this is clear: this is where the greatest number of opportunities are in the United States and this is the area with which most entering