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75 In this profile, Molly Jahn tells us how and why, as a plant geneticist, she became engaged in civic life. As the title of the profile suggests, the goals she has decided to pursue in her academic and public work have required her to reach outside the compartmentalized organizational structure of the land-grant, research university. The stories and experiences she shares about her development and work as a publicly engaged scientist and scholar help us to see and imagine the civic possibilities of the natural and biological sciences. She turns our attention to a problem she has observed of people “muddling” the distinction between academic priorities, obligations, and measures of success and what she refers to as “societal missions and accomplishments.” This distinction is of the highest importance for all those who wish to practice and support civic professionalism in the academy. In August 2006, Molly left Cornell to take up a new position as dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In the fall of 2009, she took a leave from her position as dean in order to accept a new appointment in Washington, D.C., as deputy undersecretary of research, education, and economics for USDA. Iarrived at Cornell in 1983 as a graduate student, so I’ve been here twenty-one years. I started in a tenure-track job in January of ’91 in the Department of Plant Breeding. I also have a joint appointment in the Department of Plant Biology, which came about two years ago. We have a big lab, with between twenty and thirty people that I support on soft money. We just brought in two or three million dollars worth of grants in the last couple of months. I have a twenty-year-long project exploring both fundamental, cutting-edge research and areas that have application. I believe with the kind of conviction akin to missionary zeal that fundamental and applied science are not even close to being mutually incompatible. Properly conceived—and not everything is amenable to this—they are highly synergistic ways of C H A P T E R 4 Reaching Outside the Compartmentalized Structure A Profile of Molly Jahn Professor, Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, Cornell University Interviews conducted by Neil Schwartzbach, May 27 and August 16, 2004 C H A P T E R F O U R 76 viewing the world. Actually, I feel like my professional history has really borne that out, because we publish in heavy-hitting journals and we release commercially successful crop varieties. Within the last year, I was invited to sit on the editorial board of Plant Cell, the premiere plant biology journal. But I still spend plenty of time out in the field messing around with very practical things. I’m really serious about getting work done that fulfills Cornell’s public mission. There have been certain barriers to delivering the impact of my work in the real world, and I’ve had to find some unconventional ways to work around them. I tend to think a little bit outside the box, and I tend to be very focused on delivering a specific impact, and then being sure that that impact is what I meant it to be. As for meeting grower, consumer, and environmental needs, I’ve realized that a partnership of the public, private, and nonprofit sectors is essential. I’m in close touch with the seed industry, and their job is to know what growers need. So I’ve made a practice of going directly to people within seed companies, within the private sector, who would tell me their opinion. I’ve discovered that nonprofits are very energetic if they’re serving a specialized interest like organic agriculture. So between the conventional seed business, nonprofits, and a nascent seed industry for organics, I’ve got everything I need. And I know in New York State and around the world, we’ve had some positive impact. I started out as one of those kids where school was really an outlet for me, but I also was really connected to the natural world. I spent a lot of time outside growing up, and knew a lot about what I’d now call field biology. When I was thirteen, I got extremely sick and wound up in University Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a long time. It was a life-threatening situation. When I got out, I knew that what...

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