1st Edition
The Land-Grant Colleges and the Reshaping of American Higher Education
This work provides a critical reexamination of the origin and development of America's land-grant colleges and universities, created by the most important piece of legislation in higher education. The story is divided into five parts that provide closer examinations of representative developments.
Part I describes the connection between agricultural research and American colleges. Part II shows that the responsibility of defining and implementing the land-grant act fell to the states, which produced a variety of institutions in the nineteenth century. Part III details the first phase of the conflict during the latter decades of the nineteenth century about whether land colleges were intended to be agricultural colleges, or full academic institutions. Part IV focuses on the fact that full-fledged universities became dominant institutions of American higher education. The final part shows that the land-grant mission is alive and well in university colleges of agriculture and, in fact, is inherent to their identity.
Including some of the best minds the field has to offer, this volume follows in the fine tradition of past books in Transaction's Perspectives on the History of Higher Education series.
Preface - Roger L. Geiger and Nathan M. Sorber
Part I: Scientific and Social Foundations
Introduction - Nathan M. Sorber
Institutionalizing Agricultural Research in the Early American Republic: An International Perspective - Adam R. Nelson
Creating Colleges of Science, Industry, and National Advancement: The Origins of the New England Land-Grant Colleges - Nathan M. Sorber
Educating the Toiling Peoples: Students at the Illinois Industrial University, Spring 1868 - J. Gregory Behle
Part II: The Politics of Launching Land-Grant Colleges, 1862–1890
Introduction - Nathan M. Sorber
Saving the Land Grant for the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania - Peter L. Moran and Roger L. Williams
"An Elephant In The Hands of the State": Creating the Texas Land-Grant College - Susan R. Richardson
Part III: Agriculture and Engineering, 1880–1900
Introduction - Roger L. Geiger
The Populist Vision for Land-Grant Universities, 1880–1900 - Scott Gelber
Robert H. Thurston, Modern Engineering Education, and Its Diffusion through Land-Grant Universities - Gregory Zieren
Part IV: Land-Grant Universities, 1900–1940
Introduction - Roger L. Geiger
President Edmund J. James and the University of Illinois, 1904–1920: Redeeming the Promise of the Morrill Land-Grant Act - Winton U. Solberg
Transforming the Land Grant: The University of New Hampshire and the Pennsylvania State University under the Leadership of Ralph Dorn Hetzel - Jane Robbins
Part V: Universities and the Land-Grant Mission since 1930
Introduction - Roger L. Geiger
The Land-Grant Colleges, Cooperative Extension, and the New Deal - Christopher P. Loss
Social Science over Agriculture: Reimagining the Land-Grant Mission at the University of California-Irvine in the 1960s - Ethan Schrum
Storying and Restorying the Land-Grant System - Scott J. Peters
List of Contributors
Biography
Roger L. Geiger
