A hopelessly divided country with huge military obligations. A need for more educated workers at a time when only the privileged could afford the full price of college.
These circumstances may evoke the present day, but they were actually the backdrop to the little-known but hugely influential innovation 150 years ago that gave rise to dozens of America’s best-known public universities as a way of expanding higher education to the working class.
The anniversary of the Morrill Act, establishing more than 70 so-called “land-grant” universities—including some of America’s biggest and best known—comes just as advocates are warning that cuts in support, and resulting tuition increases, threaten the ideal of broad access to U.S. public universities.
“We’re in danger of chipping away at the effectiveness of the commitment to access and affordability to higher education for the broad mass of the American people, absolutely,” said Daniel Fogel, a former president of the University of Vermont and co-editor of the newly published Precipice or Crossroads: Where America’s Great Public Universities Stand and Where They Are Going Midway through Their Second Century.
When Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act on July 2, 1862, the Civil War was raging. But the law, named for the Vermont congressman who introduced it, set aside federal land to be used or sold to establish public universities in every northern state and to educate the “sons of toil” in practical subjects such as agricultural science. After the war, it was extended to the South and, later, to U.S. territories and possessions.
Few people outside higher education have heard of the Morrill Act, but it helped establish more than 70 of what are now among the nation’s most prominent universities—mostly public, but also private and quasi-public—including Auburn, Cornell, MIT, Purdue, Rutgers, Virginia Tech, the University of California system, and the universities of Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, as well as Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania state universities.
The idea was to make college practical and democratic, when at the time it consisted largely of the classics taught to the elite in the original Greek and Latin.
