The Morrill Act of 1862 provided the funding mechanism for the modern land-grant college system. In the over 160 years since its passage, the tripartite land-grant mission of teaching, research, and service has become the most recognizable legacy of the legislation. Recent scholars of land-grant education caution against viewing the history of…

Meaningfully engaging faculty in assessment presents a continual challenge for general education administrators. Faculty perceptions of assessment--including that assessment serves no purpose other than "checking a box" for accreditation and that it conveys little benefit to the instructor--often hinder instructor engagement. A low-cost…

Popular and academic common senses turn to education as the great equalizer in American life, a seemingly obvious pathway to creating a more just world. Education, which means not only a degree, but the social relations created through affiliation with formal study, is cherished as the pathway to secure a more just society. Yet the educational…

In order to understand our present and future work in planting the seeds of solidarity, we excavate the past, through an exploration of transnational solidarity and the vestiges of U.S. legislative policy and philanthropy. Through life notes and sharing circles, we examine policies (Morrill Act of 1862, Refugee Act of 1980, and the Gates…

This article focuses on the first African American students at two southern land-grant universities, North Carolina State University and Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech). Although these institutions integrated in the 1950s, most of the current desegregation scholarship focuses on other southern institutions in…

This study characterized perceptions of agricultural leadership programs in colleges of agriculture, food, life, human, or environmental sciences at 1,862 land-grant institutions. Objectives included describing the need for programs, studying evolution within the discipline, discussing faculty recommendations for future development, and examining…

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) has been used at universities across the U.S. and Canada to gather information about the quality of engagement of first-year students and graduating students. Institutions use NSSE's five benchmarks of effective educational practice to compare themselves with other schools and to focus in on ways to…

In the struggle to remain true to their technical assistance and civic engagement missions in an era of shrinking budgets and increasingly complex accountability claims, land grant universities have developed different engagement strategies to contribute to the development of surrounding communities. Drawing on Flora and Flora's (in "Ann Am…

This article asks land grant university leaders and faculty to think of their role in community engagement not simply as the provision of technical assistance or of research and development prowess, but as an opportunity for social leadership. It explores the case of Virginia Tech's effort to develop a regionally based model to secure long-term…

With soaring uncertainty surrounding the financing of public higher education, institutions are faced with developing strategies that will enable them to effectively compete for state funding. One component to cultivating resources and relationships for colleges and universities are through government relations organizations. Utilized for…

Beginning in the fall of 2008 (and continuing through the spring of 2013), Virginia State University, America's first fully state supported four-year institution of higher learning for Blacks and one of two land-grant institutions in the Commonwealth of Virginia, launched a comprehensive and ambitious program to develop a culture of writing (and…

The Commissioner's introduction to Volume 1 includes state school system statistics. Chapter I addresses vacation schools, playgrounds, and settlements, with discussion of poor children in major cities, playground conditions, playground social conditions, play psychology, and settlement-movement history. Subsequent chapters cover laws concerning…

These proceedings contain 48 presentations and 15 poster abstracts. Papers include "Computer Tasks Required in Selected Undergraduate Agriculture Courses" (Johnson, Ferguson, Vokinnns, Lester); "College of Agriculture Faculty Perceptions of Electronic Technologies in Teaching" (Dooley, Murphy); "Steering Through Turbulent…

Hampton Institute has developed an educational technique in several lines which is of interest especially to those institutions that are still trying to find their way under difficulties and that for lack of vision as well as lack of support are unable to reach the high ideals of training which have resulted from the careful working out of the…