Land Grant University Origins & Values

This is an excerpt from a paper written for coursework toward a degree in Higher Education. Download the full paper here. 

A series of federal legislation in the late 19th and early 20th century established the foundational values upon which the modern Land Grant University structure is built. The Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 and subsequent legislation in 1994 granted tracts of land (the origin of the “Land Grant” moniker) to states of the union to fund the establishment of universities with the task of educating the children of working-class families in their territory. The Hatch Act of 1887 established supplementary “Agricultural Experiment Stations” at Land Grant Universities “to promote the efficient production, marketing, distribution, and utilization of products of the farm as essential to the health and welfare of our peoples and to promote a sound and prosperous agriculture and rural life as indispensable to the maintenance of maximum employment and national prosperity and security.” Finally, the Smith-Level Act of 1914 established the Cooperative Extension Service to disseminate information from the Land Grant and Experiment Station as well as available from the United States Department of Agriculture “to persons not attending or resident in said colleges in the several communities, and imparting information on said subjects through demonstrations, publications, and otherwise.”  This legislative combination established the so-called “tri-partite” mission of the land grant melding teaching, research, and outreach.

I focus here on identifying and critiquing the primary currents of thought about the 21st century Land Grant mission. More than two decades into the twenty-first century, we find Land Grant Institutions partly modernized, but in many ways still acting in reference to legislation from over 150 years ago. Considering the billions of dollars of federal and state funding allocated to the land universities, but also in consideration of the espoused and perceived promise of these major institutions, it is critical to evaluate modern relevance of land-grant universities.

The unspoken assumption behind much of the dominant land-grant mission discourse is that the primary mission of the land-grant university is to serve the economy: we make workers, technology, and economic development. Scholars in the field critique and promote this view. The expectation that the value of land-grants must be framed in economic terms like short-term return on investment, profit, and dollar value generated per enrolled “butt in seat” underscore this point. We humbly bow and offer market-defined justifications, not as a conciliatory gesture to a flawed, temporary and money-centric administration, but because economics has been accepted as the religion of the institution. First serve the economy and then serve the people you can in the process. It’s not simply that we cut arts programs, de-emphasize foreign languages, or sneer at French Literature majors while building new business schools and lauding those studying Chemical Engineering. It’s that we do these things while shrugging our shoulders at the Economic Truth of it all and forgo calling these actions and thoughts out as expressions of a particular power-laden value system—market capitalism. We may ultimately agree with that value system, but when we accept economic thought as the de facto logical structure for social reality and institutional identity, we ignore the possibility of choosing other values for our institutions and our communities. We deny the possibility that we may invest money with the expectation of something besides profit.
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As a pragmatic materialist, I am not given to proposing abstruse and highly unlikely solutions to problems—though I value those who can and do. I know institutions need funding to function. What I would suggest is that if the influence of funding pulls us so far off our values and mission that it changes it wholesale, then the tail has come to wag the dog and we must seriously reconsider the values we espouse in the “land-grant mission.” My worry is that we are forced to use an economic rubric to make decisions about values that transcend return on investment in any short-term context. We do this, much like our peripatetic CEO presidents and chancellors, at the peril of our long-term well-being.