Why Stanford Food Research Institute was shut down?

In the history of agricultural economics research, which is usually defined as the mission of land-grant university over the entire 20th century. However, there are two other main agricultural economics research institutes/departments outside of the land-grant university. And destiny of them are totally different, while both of them are Ivy members. The first one is the well-known Applied Economics and Management Program at Cornell University. The program was originally named the Department of Agricultural Economics, was renamed Applied Economics and Management in 2002, and was renamed most recently in 2010 in honor of Charles H. Dyson following a $25 million donation by his family. Another one is Stanford Food Research Institute, which is less well known because of its unfortunate in 1990s.


The Food Research Institute was a research and teaching department within the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University. It was established in 1921 to investigate the production, distribution, and consumpiton of food, with a particular attention to the economic analysis of agricultural commodity and marketing systems. The Institute pioneered research into areas that later became matters of national concern: studies of Soviet agriculture and the world wheat economy, begun in the 1920s; analyses of the United States population upsurge, started in the 1940s; and investigations of the economic behavior of peasant farmers, initiated in the 1950s. In recent years, Institute faculty members extended these research interests by focusing on questions of income growth and distribution within developing countries. In 1996, the University's administration decided to close the Institute. So what happened?




Reference:
[1] http://www.stanford.edu/group/FRI/fri/index.html


---to be continued