Where should farmers study?

The move of a much-loved agricultural college to urban Plymouth has aroused strong protests from students and farmers. And, says Lucy Hodges, it has raised questions about how we teach the subject

An era is coming to an end among the rolling hills and dark earth of south Devon. Seale-Hayne agricultural college, which has educated farmers for almost a century, is being closed and its students moved to Plymouth.

The move – part of a dramatic restructuring exercise by the University of Plymouth – has been greeted by a storm of protest. The Western Morning News has run a campaign, local MPs are up in arms, letters have poured into the university, the vice-chancellor has received death threats and legal action is being mooted.

The loyalty shown by former students and staff is heartfelt. "Agriculture and land-based subjects would not thrive in the concrete jungle environment of Plymouth," says the principal, Professor Fred Harper. In an open letter to the vice-chancellor, he says: "Your proposals will effectively kill agriculture and related subjects at higher education level in the South-west."

On the face of it Seale-Hayne has a lot going for it. Built in the early 1900s on a divine site – a 470-acre farm in the depths of the Devon countryside outside Newton Abbot – it may be remote but its reputation is high. It was one of the national agricultural colleges on a par with Harper Adams in Shropshire.

Jim Hosking, a former college governor who negotiated Seale-Hayne's merger with the former Plymouth Polytechnic in 1989, doesn't understand the move. "What sense is there in uprooting students studying land-based subjects from one of the finest purpose-build seats of learning in the world?" he asks. "It is a total betrayal of the trust that was put in the university in 1989 to care for, develop and expand the college."

Behind the decision, however, lie some sobering facts. The demand for agricultural degrees has plummeted in the past 10 years. Fewer and fewer young people want to go into farming. Seeing how difficult it is to make a living, the sons and daughters of farmers are choosing other careers.

There are now only 600 students at Seale-Hayne where once there were 1,200. Only four students enrolled in the first year of the agriculture single honours degree last autumn. Only 10 are in the first year of degrees in agriculture and management.

So what are the students doing? About a half are taking degrees in tourism and hospitality, according to the vice-chancellor, Professor Roland Levinsky. A quarter are doing environmentally-related subjects. All these would be better off academically being near the departments of business and management and social sciences, in Plymouth.

Agriculture students would also benefit from the move, he believes. "We don't give them the right type of education at Seale-Hayne," he says. "The farmers of tomorrow need to know about business practices, how to fight BSE, and the best policy for dealing with foot and mouth disease. They need to know about vaccinations, hygiene and microbiology. In a college like Seale-Hayne, where you would have only one person with knowledge in each of these areas, you are not giving them what they need."

Two universities with excellent reputations for agriculture, Reading and Newcastle, already teach from a city base, from where students have access to good farms and field stations – as Plymouth also plans to do. "The university has no current plans to close the farm, and will maintain a research base at Seale-Hayne for the foreseeable future," assures Professor Levinsky.

The agricultural restructuring is just one aspect of the new vice-chancellor's ambitious plans to transform Plymouth into a strong regional university powering the West Country economy. When he was interviewed for the job, he said it was untenable to operate a university on four sites: Exeter, Exmouth, Seale-Hayne and Plymouth. The art college will also be moved, from Exeter to a new flagship building in Plymouth, and will become the hub of a hip new cultural quarter linking the campus with the museum and the library. The building will contain a new faculty of arts, architecture and humanities.

Thus the university will be concentrated on Plymouth, with an outpost for teacher training in Exmouth. In the past, according to Professor Levinsky, there has been little mixing between departments. "I don't think the students were getting a good experience. I firmly believe that arts and sciences need to live side by side and need to learn from each other and students need to relate to students in other faculties."

He is talking about the synergy of people from differing disciplines coming together to create something more than the sum of their parts. All smart universities want to do this, because much of cutting-edge research today is at the intersection of disciplines where biology meets chemistry, for example, or where anthropology meets biology.

The vice-chancellor is also keen to build up the university's research base. Until it can achieve what is known in the jargon as "a critical mass" of researchers in an area it can't compete – another reason why he wants to move the Seale-Hayne people into Plymouth. The university's expansion will be part of the redevelopment of the city, now underway. The university is talking to the city fathers about a joint city/university library to be used by students and open to the people of Plymouth. The vice-chancellor also wants to develop a commercial incubator for small media businesses and is talking to the city about a waterfront development for marine science.

His ideas are ambitious and are causing a stir in higher education circles. He will have to borrow £25-£35m to realise them. But he will be helped by selling off the Exeter campus and the school of architecture. Seale-Hayne, meanwhile, will stay. Professor Levinsky hopes it can be turned into a self-financing conference centre with a science park for land-based industries and some sustainable housing. He emphasises that the rationale for restructuring is academic, not vocational (one presumes he wouldn't carry the academic vote with him if he used a financial rationale), but he makes no bones about the expense of Seale-Hayne, where the cost per student is higher than elsewhere in the university. Expensive laboratories are also duplicated, for agriculture students at Seale-Hayne and science students at Plymouth.

If Professor Levinsky is successful, the West Country will have cause to give thanks. Even Seale-Hayne loyalists may have to admit things have moved on. "We don't need people in traditional agriculture any longer," says an academic from another college. "We need is countryside managers. You can't live in the past."

l.hodges@independent.co.uk