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…

Historians of higher education generally agree on a handful of ideas about the early years of the land-grant colleges that grew out of the Morrill Act of 1862. For their first three decades, the land-grant colleges struggled to survive: lacking students, funding, and public favor. Charged, by the Morrill Act, to promote "the liberal and…

This reflective essay addresses the nexus of two recent events in the United States: (1) the public scrutiny of the relationship between land grant universities and the expropriation of Indigenous lands and (2)the often uncritical and rapid uptake of settler land acknowledgments at public college and university events. We argue that written land…

Economists have long recognized the importance of human capital in economic growth. In this series of papers, I study how various institutions of human capital formation affected economic development in a variety of contexts prior to 1900. These include both formal institutions of human capital formation such as universities and informal…

The Stepping Out and Stepping Up (SOSU) Native American Racial Justice Project initiative, developed in partnership with First Nations Development Institute (FNDI), was designed to address the dispossession and sale of tribal lands used to establish the Ohio State University. This work was inspired by the publication of the "Land Grab…

The history of professional organizations for teacher educators in agriculture is long and diverse. As formal vocational agriculture programs were established in the early 1900s it became evident that there was a need for professionally trained vocational agriculture teachers. This demand for agriculture teachers resulted in the new profession of…

This dissertation tracks the production of narratives that frame U.S. universities as ethical institutions. It argues that such narratives--in popular imaginaries and scholarly discourse--rely on elisions of the racial-colonial entanglements of higher education. In linguistics, elision refers to the deletion or omission of sound, explaining…

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are vital to higher education. Yet, many land-grant HBCUs have received lower levels of funding since their inception. While many state legislatures have targeted funding toward HBCUs in recent years, many institutions feel that the historic inequity must be remedied. This issue brief examines…

In this article, I read Hilgard Hall as a text of whiteness to explore how one campus building at the University of California, Berkeley renders racial power relations in the academy. Through the lens of critical whiteness studies, I examine Hilgard Hall's namesake, architecture features, and weighty epigraph, "to rescue for human society the…

This article provides a historical review of the FCS profession beginning with the Progressive Era and founder Ellen Swallows Richards. The review includes a summary of significant historical events and legislation, that reveal how the FCS profession addressed the needs of individuals, families, and communities from inception to the present. From…

In 1862, the U.S. House of representatives granted land to states for the express purpose of supporting the development of public universities. In turn, states were given the responsibility for providing the land upon which these universities would be built, as well as contributing monetarily to their ongoing development. Known as the Morrill Act,…

In the discourse that swirled in the mid-1800s around the creation of new American public universities, three major and interrelated tensions became evident: the first related to the continued debate regarding the proper curricular balance between practical education and classical studies; the second focused on the appropriate autonomy of…

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…

Deaf education and American Sign Language emerged in Connecticut during the early 1800s as part of a reactionary social and political agenda that included church control of government and public schools, antifeminism, anti-Catholicism, and, the topic of the present article, White nationalism. Topics discussed include the racist views of early…

Land-grant colleges were created in the mid-nineteenth century when the federal government sold off public lands and allowed states to use that money to create colleges. The land that was sold to support colleges was available because of a deliberate project to dispossess American Indians of land they inhabited. By encouraging westward migration,…