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165 “Someone has to be responsible to society for the long term,” Antonio DiTommaso points out. “Who’s it going to be?” As we learn from reading his profile, Antonio assigns a share of this responsibility to publicly funded faculty members such as himself. He pursues it in practice through his research on, and teaching about, weeds. As a participant in the public work of pursuing sustainability , he often travels beyond the campus to farms and towns in New York State, and to neighborhood gardens in New York City. While he holds a tenured faculty position in an elite research university, he tells us that he never sets himself up as somebody special. Rather, he sets himself up as a learner, both with his students and with the farmers and community members that he works with. We can learn a lot about the significance and value of higher education’s public purposes from his views, stories, and experiences. I’m an associate professor in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Cornell University . My official appointment is 55 percent research and 45 percent teaching. I’ve been at Cornell for eight years, since 1999. I was born on June 11, 1962, in a small village south of Salerno in southwestern Italy. The town was called Piaggine, and it had a population of about 3,000 folks, mostly agriculturists and farmers. I learned what subsistence agriculture was like there. This was in the late 1960s, and the southern part of Italy still wasn’t very industrialized, certainly relative to northern Italy. We had about thirty dairy cattle that were free-roaming during the spring and summer months. I spent time working with my dad. When I was nine, my parents decided to emigrate to Canada, where they had family. The main reason was economics. My father had worked ten years in Germany, so he knew what it was like to be elsewhere. They loved the land and the culture in Italy, but economically farmers were down the totem pole in that C H A P T E R 9 I Never Set Myself Up as Somebody Special A Profile of Antonio DiTommaso Associate Professor, Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, Cornell University Interview conducted by Milt Kogan, April 9, 2007 C H A P T E R N I N E 166 part of the country at that time. My dad just didn’t want to see us languish and not get anywhere with all this hard work. There was also a societal hierarchy back then in that part of Italy where if you weren’t the son or daughter of a lawyer, engineer, or medical doctor, you had little chance of making progress in life. He didn’t want that for us. In 1971 my parents decided to move to Montreal in Quebec, French Canada. I remember it clearly. We moved on May 15. My older brother, named Enrico, was eleven at the time, and I was nine. We were the only two kids in the family. It was tough leaving the homeland because the cherry trees already had small fruit at that time, whereas when we arrived in Montreal, snow from the winter was still piled up in the city parks. We were devastated. But we did have family. My father had a sister and brother in Montreal and lots of relatives, so we had a fairly strong community of folks to help us. Still, we didn’t understand a word of English or French and really felt displaced. We cried some, and we asked, “Why are we doing this?” It took us about a year to adjust, to learn to play hockey and baseball and settle in. So I grew up in Montreal and lived there for about thirty years. I completed my undergraduate degree majoring in environmental biology at McGill (Macdonald Campus) in Montreal. My dad had several jobs when we first arrived, but mostly he worked as a custodian in a local hospital. He also was an assistant chef in Italian banquet halls. He would help serve two or three hundred folks. He was, and still is, a great cook. My mom, on the other hand, was a seamstress. She worked in the textile industry in the seventies and eighties. This is before all of the textile work was shipped elsewhere in the world, especially to developing countries. Mom was a great cook, as well, by the way. My dad loved gardening. We had a...

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