Statutes that allowed for the creation of land-grant colleges in U.S. states
Morrill Land-Grant Acts
![Great Seal of the United States](//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Great_Seal_of_the_United_States_%28obverse%29.svg/140px-Great_Seal_of_the_United_States_%28obverse%29.svg.png) |
Other short titles
| Land-Grant Agricultural and Mechanical College Act of 1862
|
---|
Long title
| An Act donating Public Lands to the several States and Territories which may provide Colleges for the Benefit of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts.
|
---|
Nicknames
| Morrill Act of 1862
|
---|
Enacted by
| the
37th United States Congress
|
---|
Effective
| July 2, 1862
|
---|
|
Public law
| Pub. L.
Tooltip Public Law (United States)
37?130
|
---|
Statutes at Large
| 12
Stat.
503
|
---|
|
Titles amended
| 7 U.S.C.: Agriculture
|
---|
U.S.C.
sections created
| Later codified as
7 U.S.C.
ch. 13
§ 301 et seq.
|
---|
|
|
|
Pub. L.
Tooltip Public Law (United States)
51?841
, 26
Stat.
417
, enacted
August 30, 1890
|
The
Morrill Land-Grant Acts
are
United States
statutes
that allowed for the creation of
land-grant colleges
in
U.S. states
using the proceeds from sales of federally owned land, often obtained from Native American tribes through treaty, cession, or seizure. The
Morrill Act of 1862
(12 Stat. 503 (1862)
[1]
later
codified
as
7 U.S.C.
§ 301
et seq.) was enacted during the
American Civil War
, and the
Morrill Act of 1890
(the
Agricultural College Act of 1890
(26
Stat.
417
, later codified as
7 U.S.C.
§ 321
et seq.)) expanded this model.
Passage of original bill
[
edit
]
Justin Smith Morrill
For 20 years prior to the first introduction of the bill in 1857, there was a political movement calling for the creation of agriculture colleges. The movement was led by Professor
Jonathan Baldwin Turner
of
Illinois College
.
[2]
For example, the
Michigan Constitution
of 1850 called for the creation of an "agricultural school",
[3]
though it was not until February 12, 1855, that Michigan
Governor
Kinsley S. Bingham
signed a bill establishing the United States' first agriculture college, the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, known today as
Michigan State University
, which served as a model for the Morrill Act.
[4]
On February 8, 1853, the
Illinois Legislature
adopted a
resolution
, drafted by Turner, calling for the Illinois congressional delegation to work to enact a land-grant bill to fund a system of industrial colleges, one in each state. Senator
Lyman Trumbull
of Illinois believed it was advisable that the bill should be introduced by an eastern congressman,
[5]
and two months later Representative
Justin Smith Morrill
of
Vermont
introduced his bill.
Unlike the Turner Plan, which provided an equal grant to each state, the Morrill bill allocated land based on the number of senators and representatives each state had in Congress. This was more advantageous to the more populous eastern states.
[6]
The Morrill Act was first proposed in 1857, and was passed by Congress in 1859, but it was vetoed by President
James Buchanan
. In 1861, Morrill resubmitted the act with the amendment that the proposed institutions would teach military tactics as well as engineering and agriculture.
[7]
Aided by the secession of many states that did not support the plans, the reconfigured Morrill Act was signed into law by President
Abraham Lincoln
on July 2, 1862.
Land-grant colleges
[
edit
]
Map of
most land-grant universities
in the United States including the date of the land grant
Morrill Hall, on the campus of the
University of Maryland, College Park
(a land-grant university), is named for Senator
Justin Morrill
, in honor of the act he sponsored.
Morrill Hall
, the first building of
Cornell University
, is named for Senator
Justin Morrill
, in honor of the Morrill Land-Grant act.
Beaumont Tower
at
Michigan State University
marks the site of
College Hall
which is the first building in the United States to teach agricultural science.
The purpose of the land-grant colleges was:
without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.
[8]
From the early to mid-19th century the federal government, through 162 violence-backed cessions, expropriated approximately 10.7 million acres of land from 245 tribal nations and divided it into roughly 80,000 parcels for redistribution.
[9]
Under the act, each eligible state received 30,000 acres (120 km
2
) of federal land, either within or contiguous to its boundaries, for each member of congress the state had as of the census of 1860. This land, or the proceeds from its sale, was to be used toward establishing and funding the educational institutions described above. Under provision six of the Act, "No State while in a condition of rebellion or insurrection against the government of the United States shall be entitled to the benefit of this act," in reference to the recent
secession
of several
Southern
states and the contemporaneously raging
American Civil War
. However, after the war, in the 1870s, Mississippi, Virginia, and South Carolina each assigned one African American college land grant status; these were, respectively, Alcorn University, Hampton Institute, and Claflin University.
[10]
In 1890 the 1862 Act was extended to the former Confederate states (see below for more detailed information), and it was eventually extended to every state and territory, including those created after 1862. If the federal land within a state was insufficient to meet that state's land grant, the state was issued
scrip
which authorized the state to select federal lands in other states to fund its institution.
[11]
For example,
New York
carefully selected valuable timber land in
Wisconsin
to fund
Cornell University
.
[12]
: 9
The resulting management of this scrip by the university yielded one third of the total grant revenues generated by all the states, even though New York received only one-tenth of the 1862 land grant.
[12]
: 10
Overall, the 1862 Morrill Act allocated 17,400,000 acres (70,000 km
2
) of land, which when sold yielded a collective endowment of $7.55 million.
[12]
: 8
On September 12, 1862, the
state of Iowa
was the first to accept the terms of the Morrill Act which provided the funding boost needed for the fledgling State Agricultural College and Model Farm (eventually renamed
Iowa State University
of Science and Technology).
[13]
The first land-grant institution actually created under the Act was
Kansas State University
, which was established on February 16, 1863, and opened on September 2, 1863.
[14]
The land grant colleges transformed
engineering
education in America and boosted the United States into a position of leader in technical education. Before the Civil War, American colleges primarily trained students in
classical studies
and the
liberal arts
. For the most part, only the relatively affluent could afford higher education, and entrance requirements often required proficiency in the
dead languages
of
Latin
and
Ancient Greek
. The first Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degrees, which typically required no Latin, came into being around 1850.
[15]
American engineers were mostly educated at the
United States Military Academy
, on fortress construction, and their instructors were the authors of most engineering texts of the day. The Morrill Act changed all of that. Though the Congressional debates about the Act were largely focused on benefits to agriculture, the
mechanic arts
were specifically included in the Act's language, meaning
applied sciences
and
engineering
. The Act prohibited spending the
endowment
on constructing buildings as expensive and unnecessary, so instead the tools for engineering education increased, such as textbooks, laboratories and equipment. The number of engineers skyrocketed. Whereas in 1866 there were around 300 American men who had graduated with engineering degrees and only six reputable colleges granting them, just four years later there were 21 colleges offering engineering degrees and the total number of engineers graduated had tripled to 866. The following decade added another 2,249 engineers, and by 1911 the United States was graduating 3,000 engineers a year, with a total of 38,000 in the work force. At the time, Germany was graduating 1,800 engineers per year. The US had become the leader in technical education just 50 years after passage of the Morrill Act.
[16]
With a few exceptions (including Cornell University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
), nearly all of the land-grant colleges are public. (Cornell University, while private, administers several state-supported
statutory colleges
that fulfill its public land-grant mission to the state of New York.)
To maintain their status as land-grant colleges, a number of programs are required to be maintained by the college. These include programs in
agriculture
and
engineering
, as well as a
Reserve Officers' Training Corps
program.
Expansion
[
edit
]
The second Morrill Act (1890) was also aimed at the former
Confederate states
. This act required each state to show that race was not an admissions criterion, or else to designate a separate land-grant institution for African Americans.
[17]
Thus, the second Morrill Act facilitated segregated education, although it also provided higher educational opportunities for African Americans who otherwise would not have had them.
[18]
Among the seventy colleges and universities which eventually evolved from the Morrill Acts are several of today's
historically Black colleges and universities
. Though the 1890 Act granted cash instead of land, it granted colleges under that act the same legal standing as the 1862 Act colleges; hence the term "land-grant college" properly applies to both groups.
Later on, other colleges such as the
University of the District of Columbia
and the "1994 land-grant colleges" for Native Americans were also awarded cash by Congress in lieu of land to achieve "land-grant" status.
In imitation of the
land-grant colleges
' focus on agricultural and mechanical research, Congress later established programs of
sea grant colleges
(aquatic research, in 1966),
urban grant colleges
(urban research, in 1985),
space grant colleges
(space research, in 1988), and
sun grant colleges
(sustainable energy research, in 2003).
Agricultural experiment stations and cooperative extension service
[
edit
]
Starting in 1887, Congress also funded
agricultural experiment stations
and various categories of agricultural and veterinary research "under direction of" the land-grant universities.
[19]
Congress later recognized the need to disseminate the knowledge gained at the land-grant colleges to farmers and homemakers. The
Smith?Lever Act of 1914
started federal funding of
cooperative extension
, with the land-grant universities' agents being sent to virtually every county of every state. In some states, the annual federal appropriations to the land-grant college under these laws exceed the current income from the investment of the sales proceeds of the original land grants. In the fiscal year 2006 USDA budget, $1.033 billion went to research and cooperative extension activities nationwide.
[20]
For this purpose, then President
George W. Bush
proposed a $1.035 billion appropriation for fiscal year 2008.
[21]
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/12/STATUTE-12-Pg503a.pdf
[
bare URL PDF
]
- ^
Dodd, William E. (1911).
"Review of The Origin of the Land Grant Act of 1862 and Some Account of Its Author, Jonathan B. Turner"
.
American Journal of Sociology
.
17
(3): 406?407.
doi
:
10.1086/211983
.
ISSN
0002-9602
.
JSTOR
2763175
.
- ^
"
Michigan Constitution of 1850
". Wikisource. Article 13, Section 11. Retrieved March 5, 2008.
- ^
"
Milestones of MSU's Sesquicentennial
Archived
2007-08-06 at the
Wayback Machine
". MSU University Archives and Historical Collection. Retrieved March 5, 2008.
- ^
Letter from Lyman Trumbull to J.B. Turner, 1857-10-19.
- ^
Carl L. Becker
,
Cornell University Founders and The Founding
(Cornell University Press 1943), pp. 28?30.
- ^
"Justin Smith Morrill (1810?1898)" in
The Latin Library
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/chron/civilwarnotes/morrill.html
.
- ^
7 U.S.C.
§ 304
- ^
Lee, Robert; Ahtone, Tristan; Pearce, Margaret; Goodluck, Kalen; McGhee, Geoff; Leff, Cody; Lanpher, Katherine; Salinas, Taryn (March 30, 2020).
"Land-Grab Universities"
.
High Country News
. Retrieved
April 21,
2020
.
- ^
John W. Davis, "The Negro Land-Grant College," 2
Journal of Negro Education
p.312 (1933)
- ^
7 U.S.C.
§ 302
- ^
a
b
c
Whalen, Michael L. (May 2001).
"A Land-Grant University"
(PDF)
. Cornell University.
Archived
(PDF)
from the original on February 28, 2008
. Retrieved
August 25,
2020
.
- ^
"History of Iowa State: Time Line, 1858?1874"
. Iowa State University. 2006. Archived from
the original
on May 13, 2009
. Retrieved
July 9,
2009
.
- ^
"The National Schools of Science"
,
The Nation
: 409, November 21, 1867
- ^
Frederick Rudolph,
Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study Since 1636
p.36 (1978)
- ^
Williams, Daniel E. (Spring 2009),
"Morrill Act's Contribution to Engineering's Foundation"
(PDF)
,
Tau Beta Pi the Bent
- ^
7 U.S.C.
§ 323
- ^
Debra Reid, "People's Colleges for Other Citizens: Black Land-Grant Institutions and the Politics of Educational Expansion in the Post-Civil War Era," in
Science as Service: Establishing and Reformulating American Land-Grant Universities, 1865-1930
p. 144 (2015).
- ^
7 U.S.C.
§ 361a
- ^
USDA Budget Summary 2006 - Research, Education, and Economics
Archived
December 1, 2007, at the
Wayback Machine
- ^
"CSREES FY2008 President's Budget Proposal"
(PDF)
. Archived from
the original
(PDF)
on February 17, 2012
. Retrieved
February 12,
2013
.
Further reading
[
edit
]
- Cross, Coy F.
Justin Smith Morrill, Father of the Land-Grant Colleges.
Michigan State University Press: 1999.
ISBN
978-0-87013-508-8
.
online
- Singh, Vineeta. "Inclusion or acquisition? Learning about justice, education, and property from the Morrill Land-Grant Acts."
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies
43.5 (2021): 419?439.
- Sorber, Nathan M.
Land-grant colleges and popular revolt: The origins of the Morrill Act and the reform of higher education
(Cornell University Press, 2018)
online
.
- Lee, Robert and Tristan Ahtone. 2020. "How They Did It: Exposing How U.S. Universities Profited From Indigenous Land" PulitzerCenter.org
- Wallenstein, Peter. 2018. "The Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862 : seedbed of the American system of public universities."
Civil War Congress and the creation of modern America : a revolution on the home front.
Ohio University Press.
ISBN
9780821423387
- Zdzienicka Fanshe, Rosalie. 2020. "The Morrill Act as Racial Contract: Settler-Colonialism and U.S. Higher Education" EScholarship.org
External links
[
edit
]