The Spirit of the Land-Grant Institutions (Kerr, Davenport, Bryan, Thompson)

Epigraphs for Chapter: 

[Land-Grant colleges and universities] were engaged, like all new institutions, in trying to find out what new opportunity or service a particular type of education might have among a pioneer people. (46)

The land-grant college is built on a laboratory. It found not only its fields but its buildings and its libraries to be just such an organization of source materials for the purpose of investigation, verification and utilization. These was something, therefore, at the heart of all these colleges that soon became infectious. There was one of those disguised blessings in the fact that there were not enough text-books worthy of any use in this country to enable an agricultural professor to operate for thirty days. The few books on applied chemistry translated from the German or growing out of the imagination of somebody who had studied in Germany did not fully meet the situation. The first group of agricultural professors were somewhat like a brass band trying to play without instruments. They were compelled to go into the fields and develop by experimentation their own classified knowledge which we now term science. (47)

The men who went into these [Land-Grant] colleges were in some degree conscious of the fact that they had taken hold of a new opportunity. One needs to read very limitedly in a report of the early experiences of any of these colleges to discover that they were trying without the limitations of excessive prejudice or tradition, to do the thing that had stirred the imagination of other men and had at last won the support of Congress. (47)

 

Notes from Selection by W.J. Kerr

Servants of the state and nation… (11)

Here were conditions unknown before in this country, conditions with which the established educational institutions were unable to cope. The old education did not minister to the new wants. There was insistent demand for something else. Less of the classical and esthetic and more of the scientific and practical was called for. (9)

"It is not too much to say that through the Morrill Act of 1862, and subsequent acts, Congress has wrought a revolution in American education," said Senator Knute Nelson, of Minnesota, in an address discussing the effect of this national legislation. "The old educational ideals .... have slowly given way to the far broader ideals for a system of public education suited to the needs alike of workers, business men, homemakers, technicians, and professionals. The new education, while retaining the high moral and ethical ideals of the old, combines with these substantial training in doing the things of everyday life." (10)

The people to be served by the new institutions determined the field of study to be offered. The "industrial classes," as named in the Morrill Act, obviously included all classes of people except those already provided with professional training for the ministry, medicine, or the law. For the first time in history all these classes of people-farmers, artisans, merchants, bankers, technicians, scientists, homemakers, engineers-were to be provided with the opportunity for higher education on the same basis as the clergymen, physicians, and lawyers. The new type of college fulfilled the needs and aspirations of the common people. It offered equal opportunity to all. It limited the level of achievement, as well as opportunity, by no standard of wealth, privilege, or patronage. (10)

At the time of their establishment, the land-grant institutions were beset by many difficulties. Opening their doors to the many instead of the few, they found that their curricula must be differentiated to meet the needs of that increasing throng of students who were seeking something vital to their life careers. There was neither pattern nor precedent for such curricula. The application of science in training for the various technical callings as we know them today had to be developed. There was no science of agriculture, no skilled teachers, no methods of instruction. Engineering knowledge was also very limited. There was utter lack of trained men for technical faculties. Hence the biologist and the chemist engaged in training students for scientific agriculture, the physicist and the mathematician, training students for engineering, had to work out, through their own research, the practical application of general scientific principles in the several technical specialties. True to their mission as the "people's colleges," the newly created institutions set about to discover a new type of instruction. Without chart or guide, they struck out into the wilderness of the unknown and mapped new trails in education. (12)

Inspired by a realization that "the difficulties of democracy are the opportunities of education," they pressed into the new frontier. Gradually they built up a body of scientific information. Steadily, as this scientific, technical, and practical knowledge was collected and systematized, new courses of instruction were evolved. Higher education was being definitely emancipated from the stereotyped molds of classical education. The early land-grant colleges builded better than they knew. (12)

Notes from Selection by Eugene Davenport

One of the things that reading these pieces is helping me to understand and appreciate is the radical nature of the land-grant experiment--it's helping me to understand what kind of place the U.S. was in the mid 19th century and how tradition reigned as an ideology or way of being over knowledge and progress.

Themes

Language That Describes the Tradition/Progress Binary

• For tradition, not to say superstition, was the common guide to practice and knowledge was not yet really at work in the affairs of mankind. (21) 
• We called it the "New Education" in those early days as distinct from the traditional. In the narrowness of our enthusiasm we called it practical and useful as distinct from the classical and useless. For of what good is it when a man can say "I am hungry" in six or seven languages but cannot earn his own bread and butter? (22)
• the old-time educator insisted that education and utility were mutually exclusive. Even the earlier scientific researches in the industries were dubbed commercial and uneducative if the investigator had in the back of his head the slightest notion that the results of his researches might, some time or other, in some way, become of use in the world. Against such tidal waves of prejudice did the land-grant spirit pound in its early efforts to bless mankind (22) 

Language That Describes the Legislation

• a new spirit was born into the policy and purpose of education in America (21)
• a voice in the darkness (21)
• an almost unblazed trail (21)
• this new spirit in the world (21)
• a departure this new spirit was in the field of educational theory and practice (22) 
• the new education, as it was called in those days immediately following. (24) 
• Nothing but talk and there was plenty of that, though not enough to deter the new spirit from forging ahead over a. difficult trail not yet even blazed for much of the way. (24) 

Language That Describes the People the Legislation Was Aimed to Help

• that mass of our common citizenry who live by the soil or the shop (21)
• the multitude (22)
• So the world wagged, less than a hundred years ago, as it had wagged for generations, conservative to a fault; an educated aristocracy, bigoted and prejudiced; an ignorant mass, living by tradition for want of better guides. The one secretly despising the lower classes, the other distrusting those not of its own kind, yet living together under a so-called democracy. (22) 

Language That Describes the Purpose of the Legislation

• to consider the student body not as the thing for which the institution exists but as a means to an end and that end an advancing civilization (21)
• until education has overleaped the campus walls and gone out among the people to enrich their lives and make them college minded if only they can read and have the desire to know and to grow (21) 

Language that Describes the Orientation of Tradition Towards the "New Education"

• Curiously enough, the slogan of the educated world was culture, a word which, in its time of greatest abuse, I learned almost to hate. But my hate finally turned to pity for the poor abused term because there never were courses, and never have been courses, more intensely technical or more frankly professional than those same old courses in law, medicine and theology. Even when bemoaning our "prostituting the sacred cause of education to the business of making a living" these courses were continued and serenely labelled "cultural." The "educated classes" of those days lived in a world of their own and largely of their own making. (24) 
• educators generally condemned the "prostitution of education to mere commercial ends," insisting that no such training could be truly educative. (25) 

Language that Touches on the Issue of Pedagogy

• But here was a new purpose in education, involving new materials and new methods. (24) 

Other:

An interesting question that arises from this passage:

One other significant fact must be borne in mind at this point, namely, that anything like research, as we understand the term, either for the student or the teacher, did not then exist. All teaching was from authority and decidedly empirical. The purpose was to train the student in the accepted dicta of his profession. He was not expected to improve upon his predecessors and he found himself in trouble if he tried it. His business was to be "regular" and loyal to all the traditions of his profession. (24)

So, my question: What was the greater influence when it comes to the shift that colleges and universities experienced during the second half of the 19th century? The importation of the German model or the rise of the land-grant colleges?

I think that the German model advanced a vision of the "disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake" whereas the land-grants advanced a vision of the interested pursuit of knowledge, not knowledge for its own sake, but, instead, knowledge built out of real world problems and concerns which speaks back to such concerns...practical knowledge, not knowledge for its own sake and certainly not disinterested...

Sum Up:

And now to sum up the situation as I have seen it and lived with it for over half a century watching its service and growth. The Spirit of the Land-Grant Institution is the Spirit of Service through the application of exact knowledge to the ordinary affairs of life. It began as an attempt to provide an appropriate literature for the man on the farm and in the workshop. It has resulted not only in developing our major industries but in establishing a research and teaching service as broad as the interests of mankind and the limitations of knowledge, a service in which the student and the individual is always a means to an end and that end an ever- advancing civilization. The Spirit of the Land-Grant Colleges has developed into a national system of Public Service Institutions. (29)

Notes from Selection by E.A. Bryan

(this was the worst written/hardest to discern)

Language That Describes the Tradition/Progress Binary

• For earlier higher education was the possession of a caste. It was so looked upon by its members; it was so looked upon by the public. Not that the neophyte might not enter the caste from the lower walks of life, even the humblest. He was not barred because of lack of wealth or birth. But once in he was of the caste; he was no longer of the station in life into which he had been born. The scholar was a true aristocrat, in his own eyes and in the eyes of the world. His dress, his language, even his walk betrayed the caste to which he belonged. (31)
• There is a place in the university for the pursuit of purely abstract problems, a place where the contemplative scholar may retreat from human and material contacts and concerns and where undisturbed he may consider even the curious and the unrelated. There is a place where he may consider the traces of man in the distant past, and the evidence of his religions, his politics and his physical environments. But shall we admit these subjects and not admit the study of man's present and his future? There is a place for the ancient classics; shall there not be a place for the modern classics? It is true that the college of the old regime professed to have a close relation to the ultimate spiritual welfare and orderly life of the entire community. Yet academies of the middle of the last century were shocked that for the purposes and ends of the new system, frankly declared, courses of instruction were included intended to promote the welfare of the masses. (35) 
• ...academic freedom, the instruments and methods of modern science, research as an integral element in the university, the economic welfare of the masses, national solidarity in our educational system, the championship of educational opportunities for women. (38)

Language That Describes the Legislation

• The advent of the system constitutes an epoch in higher education. It was the beginning of a revolution whose full force is not yet spent. It has been a revolution in the means or instruments used in higher education; in the methods employed; and in the purposes of those who seek it and in the community that provides it. (30)
• a movement toward democracy. (31)
• a revolt of all the classes but one against the favoritism shown to a highly specialized class. (34)
• And freedom in the things which the college student might study meant freedom of election. And freedom to choose subjects to study meant also revolt from Authority; revolt from a repressive curriculum; revolt from the authority of the book, dogma, tradition. In the words of an apostle of the new gospel, "Ask the grasshopper how many legs he has. Don't go to the book. The book may lie. Grasshopper will tell you the truth." (34) 
• It is beyond dispute that the narrow, cast iron, stereotyped curriculum of that day emphasized a "particular favored phase of education" and favored a particular small class to the practical exclusion of its usefulness to nearly the entire population. It was against this that our industrial democracy revolted. It was to break the bonds by which we were thus bound that the Act of 1862 was passed. (37)  

Language that Touches on the Issue of Pedagogy

• It was inevitable that escape could be made only by the scientific method- by the use of an inductive philosophy. The deductive philosophy was characteristic of the old regime. (34) 
• The new system to which the charter of '62 gave life involved the use of the inductive system. When things were to be studied the student must rely on analysis and synthesis, on observation and comparison. He must see, feel, smell, taste, weigh, measure, record. What a revolution within college halls did this new system involve! (34)
• Memory of verbal forms, accents, idioms, vocabularies had been the chief virtue of the gifted student and dictionary, grammar and texts his chief instruments. Under the new regime, test tubes, flasks, scales, thermometers, reagents, microscopes, telescopes, plants, minerals, animals, apparatus and machinery, ad infinitum, were the necessary instruments and inquiry and determination the method. (34) 

Notes from Selection by W.O. Thompson

Language That Describes the Legislation

• First of all, let me remind you that the land-grant colleges did not have the ordinary background such as was common among the colleges of the older type. They were not the setting up on a new soil of the same old type of house in which the fathers had lived for generations, This movement was not an effort to transplant from across the waters the type of institution that had greatly benefited other people. Nor was this type of institution born of the existing colleges. They were not overlooked in the consideration and discussion of the Land- Grant Act. They have been more carefully studied since the advent of the land-grant colleges than before that date. Indeed the entire field of education has been subjected to a searching inquiry. It is also true that the Land-Grant Act laid the foundation for a reform movement. (43)
• ...the spirit of the land-grant colleges was a progressive spirit contented in one particular, namely, to be a college where investigation and research make a distinct contribution to the increase of knowledge (50)