...where the leading objects shall be, without excluding other scientific or classical studies, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts" (Morrill Act)
Main issues...
- how to resolve the practical/humanities distinction
- how to attract students
- what to teach
- insufficient backgrounds and/or preparation of entering students
Difficult as the launching of the land-grant colleges had been i provide to be even more difficult to work out an acceptable program of study for these new institutions. During the first two decades of their existence, they had to face the apathy, or even hostility, of the great mass of American farmers. Many of the latter wanted little more than a trade school. Even the interpretation of the wording of the Morrill Act was in hot dispute in this connection. The National Grange and the Farmer's Alliance made constant complaint that the new colleges were too theoretical and classical in their curricular offerings and had little to offer the average farmer. Indeed, many of these new foundations did seem to go to great lengths to imitate eastern liberal-arts colleges in order, among other things, to attain www was then considered academic respectability. Ultimately, agitation by Populists produced state legislative investigations of the use of Morrill Act funds in California in 1873 and in Ohio in 1877. (63)
There were also difficulties in finding students adequately prepared to enter. Many of the A. and M. institutions, before the rise of public high schools, had to admit students just out of the common schools. (63)
In addition, the necessary scientific and technical information on which to base the curriculum of the new institutions was simply not available at first...One contemporary leader of the movement described the first group of A. and M. professors as somewhat like a brass band trying to play without instruments. (63)
...the passage of the second Morrill Act of 1890, and of subsequent legislation in the twentieth century, greatly increased the amount of federal aid to these institutions. (64)
How shall we summarize the significance of the land-grant colleges? They were among the first institutions of learning in the United States to welcome applied science and the mechanic arts and to give these subjects a recognized place in the college curriculum. They fostered the emancipation of American higher education from a purely classical and formalistic tradition. President Welch of the Iowa State Agricultural College expressed this pragmatic philosophy in 1871 when he asserted "that knowledge should be taught for its uses; that culture is an incidental result." (64)
Lucas, Christopher J. American Higher Education: A History, 2nd ed. New York, NY: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2006.
Traditional accounts of the development of land-grant colleges paint a roseate picture of populist institutions immediately responding to the swelling demand for utilitarian learning, of business and industry prospering from the ensuing diffusion of academic expertise, of rustics crowding into classrooms to learn how to boost agricultural productivity and increase their acreage yields. The actual historical record is at once more complex and more ambiguous. Until the second Morrill Act of 1890 provided for regular annual appropriations, for example, state support for land-grant colleges was rarely better than marginal. Colleges, after all, represented a loss of potential tax revenue; worse yet, they made burdensome claims on the public treasury. Hence, it was almost inevitable that for years financially pressed state legislatures temporized, reneged on promises and otherwise tried to evade the requirements to support an school authorized under the Merrill Act. Much effort went into the search for ways to make the colleges self-supporting; tuition surcharges, sales of produce for a college's farms, even work-study programs once again. (154-155)
Contrary to expectations, land-grant colleges in their formative period had a difficult time attracting students. In New Hampshire, when the state's first land-grant institution opened its doors, not a single individual applied for admission. (155)
...what reformers underestimated was the extent to which those entering college were seeking to leave the farm. For many farmers' sons and daughter, attending college was a means of escaping the poverty, boredom, and drudgery of wrestling a living from the soil. (156)
Confusing the situation still further was the chronic disagreement that existed over the proper balance to be struck within a land-grant institution between traditional classical studies and technical specialties. Land-grant schools typically tended to emphasize the practical over the ornamental. But it was an issue of bitter contention that often divided faculties and trustees. In the end, with the federal government offering little or no guidance about how to proceed, each institution found itself free to experiment and to seek its own solutions. (157)
In an age when the high school as an institution was either nonexistent or as yet still undeveloped, state colleges and universities played a vital role in helping to articulate secondary and higher education. (158)
Thinking about the transition from "the Old College" (i.e required course of study, same for all students) to "the New College" (i.e. the elective system and the creation of academic majors and minors) during the final quarter or so of the twentieth century...and what this portends for a study of the English major at UNH... "The age of radical curricular egalitarianism was at hand" (176)
The metamorphosis of the American college into the university as predominant model in American higher education was marked by several highly visible changes:
- the introduction of electives and a meter element of undergraduate curricular choice;
- marked reluctance on the part of a growing number of schools to serve in loco parentis, that is, as parental surrogates for students;
- the addition of undergraduate and graduate preparatory training for careers formerly excluded from academe;
- the emergence of large graduate institutions whose professed loyalties were to pure research and Wissenbchaft, or investigation and writing in the broadest sense (as distinct from the diffusion of knowledge through teaching);
- allegiance to academic freedom;
- and increasingly specialized scholarship, together with the institutional reorganizations of faculties within separate, discipline-based academic departments.
For the catholicity of interest that supposedly had been characteristic of the old-time college, the sense of acquaintance with a common body of knowledge and ideals shared by all, had been substituted a discordant array of specialists, each bent on refining and extending his own disciplinary interests. (American Higher Education: A History, p. 185)
"The function of the college is liberal education [...] the opening of the mind to the great departments of human interest; the opening of the heart to the great spiritual motives of unselfishness and social service; the opening of the will to opportunity for wise and righteous self-control" William DeWitt Hyde, qtd. in American Higher Education: A History, p. 188).
What seemed abundantly clear was the the model or paradigm prevailing at the opening of the twentieth century differed markedly from the old ideal that had held sway approximately a half century before. If the old-time college typically was defined by teaching and a fixed curriculum still dominated by classical languages and literature, the new university defined itself in terms of research and a bewildering array of modern utilitarian programs of study. If the old college tended to be paternalistic and intimately involved in the lives of its students, the new university was inclined to be more impersonal, more permissive, less directly engaged in student supervision. Above all, as the old college was small, the university was large. (American Higher Education: A History, p.194)
As a professor of Greek at Columbia interpreted them in 1907, the basic purposes of a university were multiple:
to preserve and transmit liberal culture;
to share useful knowledge with the populace at large;
to serve as an agent of beneficial social change in a burgeoning industrial and commercial order;
and to serve as a center for disinterested inquiry and the production of new knowledge through research and scholarly writing. (194)
To a growing number of undergraduates in the first third of the twentieth century, attending college marked a pleasant interlude between the end of adolescence and the assumption of adult responsibilities. (208)
Enrollment Demographics
In 1870, about 52,000 students were enrolled in four-year post-secondary education, or less than 2 percent of the population aged 18-21. In the 1890s the figure had risen to 3 percent; and by 1900 it hovered around 4 percent, representing a total of around 238,000 undergraduates and an additional 5,700 graduate students. By the 1920s, the percentage doubled; and it was to reach 12 percent in the next decade. On the eve of World War II the figure stood at 18 percent. (213)
...the percentage of women undergraduates continued to rise, increasing from about 21 percent in 1870 to 32 percent in 1880, to almost 40 percent by 1910, and then to over 47 percent by 1920. (214)
Curricular Matters
The supplanting of the more or less fixed, uniform classical curriculum of the mid-1800s with an elective system and the introduction of a vast array of utilitarian courses of study by century's end had marked an important shift in academic thought. (218)
Even as academicians continued to make vague rhetorical obeisance to the demand for social utility, they returned to theme of liberal culture as the proper aim of higher learning. (220)
Much of the curricular history of higher learning in America between the 1920s and the 1940s in fact turned on the issue of how colleges and universities attempted to avoid the intellectual anarchy of excessive specialization. (222)
Thelin, John. A History of American Higher Education. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Nor did the language of the Morrill Act explicitly define the courses of study a state was to implement. In addition to the "A & M" fields, the Morrill Act gave states broad encouragement to offer the liberal arts. Foremost among these was California, where California College of Oakland was transformed into the University of California, with a curriculum that closely approximated the offerings of a New England college. At other land-grant state colleges, the hiring of faculty and the design of academic programs sometimes had only themes incidental connection to agriculture or engineering. In some cases this was a lifesaver for the state colleges in their quest to attract students--expecially when professors came to understand that for many rural youths the driving ambition in going to college was to acquire credentials that would enable them to escape the farm. (78)
State colleges that were linked to the 1862 Morrill Act remained underdeveloped for several decades. And for all of American higher education, the halcyon era of university-building characterized by advanced scholarship and specialized research was yet to come. (109)
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