Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt: The Origins of the Morrill Act and the Reform of Higher Education

By Nathan M. Sorber

Clearly written and compellingly argued, Nathan Sorber's Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt should be read by every land-grant institution graduate and faculty and staff member, and by all high government officials who deal with public higher education.― Times Higher Education

Sorber's history of the movement and society of the time provides an original framework for understanding the origins of the land-grant colleges and the nationwide development of these schools into the twentieth century.

The land-grant ideal at the foundation of many institutions of higher learning promotes the sharing of higher education, science, and technical knowledge with local communities. This democratic and utilitarian mission, Nathan M. Sorber shows, has always been subject to heated debate regarding the motivations and goals of land-grant institutions. In Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt, Sorber uncovers the intersection of class interest and economic context, and its influence on the origins, development, and standardization of land-grant colleges.

The first land-grant colleges supported by the Morrill Act of 1862 assumed a role in facilitating the rise of a capitalist, industrial economy and a modern, bureaucratized nation-state. The new land-grant colleges contributed ideas, technologies, and technical specialists that supported emerging industries. During the populist revolts chronicled by Sorber, the land-grant colleges became a battleground for resisting many aspects of this transition to modernity. An awakened agricultural population challenged the movement of people and power from the rural periphery to urban centers and worked to reform land-grant colleges to serve the political and economic needs of rural communities. These populists embraced their vocational, open-access land-grant model as a bulwark against the outmigration of rural youth from the countryside, and as a vehicle for preserving the farm, the farmer, and the local community at the center of American democracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781501712371

Book preview

LAND-GRANT COLLEGES AND POPULAR REVOLT

THE ORIGINS OF THE MORRILL ACT AND THE REFORM OF HIGHER EDUCATION

NATHAN M. SORBER

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For Ainsley McHenry-Sorber

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

1. Experimentation in Antebellum Higher Education

2. Justin Morrill, the Land-Grant Act of 1862, and the Birth of the Land-Grant Colleges

3. The Land-Grant Reformation

4. The New Middle Class and the State College Ideal

5. Progressivism and the Rise of Extension

6. Coeducation and Land-Grant Women

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

This book began during an alumni weekend at Bucknell University in 2006. While leafing through works on the history of higher education in Bertrand Library, I encountered The American College in the Nineteenth Century. After spending some time with the volume, I reached two conclusions: first, I wanted to learn more about how the social and economic changes of that century transformed higher education; and second, I needed to get myself to Penn State to work with the book’s author, acclaimed historian Roger Geiger. It is difficult to measure the influence that Roger Geiger has had on my thinking—having researched, read, reread, critiqued, and taught his work over the last decade. Through his formidable example, I honed my craft and found my own voice as a historian of higher education.

While I did not know it at the time, the historiographical debates introduced in The American College in the Nineteenth Century would be critical to my scholarship. A previous generation of revisionist historians had challenged traditional interpretations of higher education in the nineteenth century, including the origins and early years of the land-grant colleges. I had the fortune at Penn State to connect with revisionist historian Roger Williams, whose book George W. Atherton and the Origins of Federal Support for Higher Education was most responsible for displacing the land-grant canon. It soon became apparent to me that while the historians that came before me had broken the old consensus on land-grant history, nothing had taken its place. People had been writing about land-grant colleges for a century and a half, but at the dawn of the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the movement, there was remarkably no working interpretation of the origins and early years of the land-grant colleges and universities. Filling this void has been my lofty goal.

When I learned of the grange campaigns against land-grant colleges in New England, I knew I had found a historical event that had promise in elucidating the tensions over the original purpose of the Morrill Act. When I discovered documents outlining Justin Morrill being roasted by farmers at the University of Vermont, I came to believe that, in the words of Karl Marx, land-grant history needed to be turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet. It also became clear that there was no straightforward progression that could give some linear clarity to the land-grant movement, and thus I have tried to capture the dialectics of competing visions of the Morrill Act to explain the ambiguous and at times contradictory purposes and forms that land-grant colleges have taken throughout history.

I am thankful to have worked at excellent institutions that have made this project possible. The Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State allowed me the opportunity to travel and research land-grant colleges throughout the Northeast. Along with the support of an incredible faculty, graduate students in the higher education program were a constant source of intellectual stimulation. Much of this book was written at West Virginia University, and I am indebted to my colleagues for supporting and celebrating my scholarship. This includes excellent graduate students who helped me expand my thinking as I defended my land-grant ideas to multiple cohorts of my history of higher education classes. In 2017, I became the founding director of the Center for the Future of Land-Grant Education at West Virginia University, the only higher education research center in the country focused exclusively on land-grant institutions, policies, access and success, leadership, and engagement. This book contributes to the center’s mission to advance knowledge of land-grant colleges and universities and to preserve these unique organizations for future generations.

I am deeply appreciative that my fellow education historians were willing to take time from their busy schedules to consider my ideas and provide commentary. This book was not just polished through this feedback; insights from fellow historians opened my eyes to new directions and helped me capture missing themes. In short, they made this a much better book. I wish to thank the following persons for help along the way on this book or on related papers or presentations: Roger Geiger, Roger Williams, Chris Loss, Scott Gelber, Ezekiel Kimball, John Thelin, Philo Hutcheson, Christine Ogren, Adam Nelson, Tim Cain, Christian Anderson, Alan Marcus, and Scott Peters. I was also fortunate to work with Cornell University Press, especially Michael McGandy and his staff. His guidance, professionalism, and enthusiasm for this project were essential and very much appreciated. I would also like to recognize the considerable research support that was given by my graduate assistant Lorena Ballester.

My daughter Ainsley, a fine writer in her own right, was born at the beginning of this project, and my son Oliver was born at its conclusion. I love them dearly, and I hope I did not miss too many moments in their lives while finishing this work. I also thank my parents for giving me a running start by providing for my education and nurturing my interests, and I give thanks to my in-laws for their support of my growing family along the way.

I reserve my final and most heartfelt thanks to my partner at home, at work, and in life—Erin McHenry-Sorber. She has not only taken time from her own scholarship to give me notes on my book but has also been a bedrock of support during all the difficult moments that come with such a journey. She is my inspiration, the source of my passion, my reason for being. This book, like so many things in my life, was only possible because of her.

Introduction

Reconsidering the Origins and Early Years of the Land-Grant Colleges

In the winter of 1888, President Matthew Buckham of the University of Vermont faced relentless criticism for failing to serve farmers. The university had been founded in 1792, and under the terms of the Morrill Act, the Vermont legislature designated it a land-grant college in 1864. The law provided states with federal land to be sold as a permanent higher education endowment, and it stipulated that the land-grant colleges make provisions to teach such branches of learning related to agriculture and the mechanical arts … in order to promote the liberal and professional education of the industrial classes.¹ The 1860s were years of prosperity for Vermont farmers, and they largely ignored the Morrill Act and the land-grant arrangement forged in their state. During the economic depression of the 1870s, however, displaced and discouraged yeomen joined the Patrons of Husbandry (hereafter referred to as the grange) in large numbers. Through this organization, farmers developed a unified political consciousness and came to view banks, railroads, and land-grant colleges as sources of their economic woes.² Grangers argued before state committees that the liberal arts and science curriculum at the University of Vermont was contributing to the rapid population decline in rural counties as young men tended to use their collegiate credential to leave the farm for the white-collar world. Instead, the grange pressed President Buckham to purchase a campus farm and offer vocational studies, which grangers hoped would limit students’ career choice to farming. Grange leaders complained that high academic standards and tuition costs kept poor youths with only a common school education out of the university, and they demanded free, open-access land-grant education.³ Under siege, Buckham penned University of Vermont trustee Justin Morrill, the father of the land-grant college movement, for assistance. After months of prodding, Senator Morrill agreed to defend the beleaguered university and publicly declare that the curriculum and academic standards of the University of Vermont conformed to his land-grant vision.⁴

On October 10, 1888, Morrill, by then eighty years of age, delivered an address before the Vermont legislature. After a brief history of the law, Morrill revealed that his fundamental purpose in crafting the Morrill Act was to offer an opportunity … for a liberal and larger education to larger numbers, not merely to those destined to sedentary professions, but to those needing higher instruction for the world’s business, for industrial pursuits. It was not manual education, he argued, but intellectual instruction [that] was the central object, and the legislation was intended to elevate science throughout higher education. The advance of scientific knowledge and the production of highly trained graduates were required to ensure the competitiveness of the United States, Morrill argued, as land-grant colleges needed to produce graduates ready to guide and lead the industrial forces of a great nation. He exclaimed that sons of farmers need not return to the farm but had the same right to social mobility as any other class: There is no assumed heredity in the vocation of the farmer, and his son has all the world before him where to choose his calling as much as the son of the minister or the lawyer.⁵

By October 1890, state grange leader Alpha Messer was pleading with the state legislature to reject Senator Morrill’s interpretation of his own law. According to Messer, land-grant colleges had a responsibility to reverse the falling fortunes of rural communities by channeling students back to the farm. To achieve this, the grange leader contended that these schools for the industrial classes should instruct the mind, eye, and hand to perform the skills of a specific line—as farmers, blacksmiths, carpenters, roadmen, and stone-cutters. Convinced that the University of Vermont could not be reformed to these ends, he presented a petition from five thousand farmers supporting a new land-grant college for Vermont. Upon its submission, Messer praised successful agricultural schools in Michigan and Kansas, where students learned practical skills like judging and breeding stock and where boys were taught to make joints, use blacksmith tools, [and] do cabinet work. Such practices were not possible at the University of Vermont, he asserted, since there was no farm or machine shop, and the faculty remained beholden to traditional liberal education.⁶

A week later, fifteen students from the University of Vermont presented a petition in defense of the university. Three of the boys testified before the legislature, describing the advantages of having agricultural education connected to the University of Vermont and proclaiming that aggie students were treated as well as regular students. President Buckham agreed, saying farmers’ sons were happy.… I have asked them myself!⁷ The House was unmoved, and it voted to create a new land-grant college. Yet, in the upper chamber, senators rejected the separation bill by a vote of 18 to 12. Grange letters to the agricultural press decried the vote and belittled the senators for dastardly obedience … to the behest of the ‘culture’ lobby!⁸ Alpha Messer, dejected, wrote a friend that the struggle … before our late legislature was a very hard one with popular favor almost entirely on our side. For some reason, as yet unexplained, two or three senators went back on us which killed our bill.⁹ The unexplained cause was Justin Morrill, who in addition to his address before the legislature, delivered an editorial to the Burlington Free Press explaining his liberal and scientific purposes for the land-grant act.¹⁰ Morrill also wrote numerous letters to senators and convinced wavering Republicans that passage of the bill would put a lawsuit on [their] hands, and with the aid of the entire Democratic Party, the grange would take this legislative victory to mean they could push whatever legislation they may think proper.¹¹ After the senate vote, Morrill wrote Buckham, I am rejoiced that the state has been saved … from the folly of exchanging its college at Burlington for a school in some town willing to bond itself for $50,000 to put up a Mechanics Shop.¹²

Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt

The attempted takeover of land-grant education in Vermont was not an isolated incident. It was but one example of a broader higher education reform movement that occurred across Yankeedom in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island originally chose Yale College’s Sheffield Scientific School, Dartmouth College, and Brown University, respectively, as land-grant recipients in the 1860s. As in Vermont, grange leaders came to criticize the curricula, academic standards, and cost of these institutions. Between 1887 and 1892, state legislatures withdrew the land-grant designation from Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown, and used the funds to establish three new land-grant colleges: Connecticut Agricultural College, Rhode Island Agricultural College, and the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts. Conforming to the will of their grange backers, these institutions maintained vocational programs, practical instruction, broad access, and required labor on campus farms. Other regional land-grant colleges also confronted grange antagonism but, in general, were able to improve relations with farmers and prevent takeovers by introducing short courses for practicing farmers and outreach to rural communities. Indeed, it would be the extension innovations pioneered at northeastern land-grant colleges that proved most successful in curbing years of grange unrest.

This book is a history of the social and political contest to define the meaning of the Morrill Act and control land-grant colleges and universities. There was never a singular land-grant ideal, but instead the meaning of the law was debated by people with diverging class interests. The grangers wanted practical studies and manual labor as the best preparation to work and live on a farm, where upon graduation, young men could return home to preserve rural communities, defend white, working-class masculinity, and resist the growing cultural, economic, and social hegemony of white, middle-class men. In contrast, a bourgeois coalition of professionals, businessmen, scientists, and statesmen viewed the Morrill Act as a way to promote social mobility, expand scientific knowledge, and spur economic development. So conceived, the land-grant college could move a surplus of rural youths into new middle-class positions that served a modern economy.¹³

Standing betwixt these competing quests for social and economic power were women, who were often relegated to separate institutions, programs, or classrooms. Yet women dismissed arguments that land-grant utilitarianism (either for middle-class mobility or work on the farm) made the colleges inherently male, and they came to attend land-grant colleges in large numbers for diverse and idiosyncratic reasons. In a similar vein, the class solidarity of the bourgeoisie or farmers rarely crossed racial boundaries, as social mobility was a white prerogative, and the black farmer was afforded no consideration in the grange’s romantic prophecies of how land-grant colleges could resurrect a yeoman republic and a Jeffersonian social order. The competing land-grant designs expressed in Yankeedom were tied to socially constructed, class-based images of white manhood, and female and African American students had to create or negotiate their own land-grant purposes and spaces.¹⁴

This book traces a three-decade conflict in the northeastern United States to uncover how the intersection of class interest and economic context had a decisive influence on the origins, development, and standardization of land-grant colleges. Although anchored in one region, this history provides an original framework for understanding land-grant development nationwide. This book reveals that the debates over the form and function of the land-grant colleges were part of a larger contest to define the political, social, and economic foundations of American society. Born amid a civil war that confronted irresolvable visions of the future of the United States, the land-grant colleges assumed a role in facilitating the rise of a capitalist, industrial economy and a modern, bureaucratized nation-state. Through the advancement, dissemination, and application of useful knowledge, the land-grant colleges contributed new ideas, technologies, and technical specialists that supported emerging industries (including scientific agriculture) premised on mechanization and scientific principles. Indeed, the postwar economic order demanded professionals that land-grant colleges could supply: individuals with scientific training and verifiable competencies who, upon mastering a set body of knowledge, could develop and manage complex tasks and processes. The land-grant colleges also nourished an increasingly active and encompassing federal government. Although land-grant colleges were primarily funded and overseen by the states, they were entwined with the nation-building goals of the victorious North. By supplying technocrats for a professionalized bureaucracy that replaced antiquated patronage staffing, the land-grant colleges provided intellectual tools for systematizing and rationalizing government responses to social, economic, and political issues. To some early supporters, the land-grant colleges could transcend the local control of political and economic life that had defined the United States since its founding by producing generalizable and transferable knowledge and practices that could promote national cohesion and development.

During the populist revolts chronicled in this book, the land-grant colleges became a battleground for resisting many aspects of this transition to modernity. An awakened agricultural population challenged the movement of people and power from the rural periphery to urban centers and worked to reform land-grant colleges to serve the political and economic needs of rural communities. These populists embraced a vocational, open-access land-grant model as a bulwark against the outmigration of rural youths from the countryside and as a vehicle for preserving the farm, the farmer, and the local community at the center of American democracy. The land-grant colleges would exhibit impressive malleability in the face of these competing demands, sometimes adopting incongruent purposes and programs—spread across lecture halls, laboratories, campus farms, football fields, and extension offices—in an effort to be both national and local, to be meritorious and widely accessible, to advance disciplinary knowledge and to distribute useful knowledge, to promote individual mobility, and to uplift communities. Through the political conflict that defined the origins and early years of the movement, the land-grant college developed its tripartite mission of teaching, research, and service, and, in doing so, channeled and tempered the class warfare of the late nineteenth century.

Land-Grant History

The events in Vermont challenge the long-standing mythology of Justin Morrill and the land-grant colleges. The stark image of the father of the People’s Colleges opposing the will of farmers runs counter to public memory, where this son of a blacksmith is celebrated in campus memorials and biographies for expanding higher education access to the the industrial classes.¹⁵ Popular dissatisfaction with land-grant colleges also cuts against the grain of land-grant historiography. Historians have depicted the land-grant movement as a rebuke of the elite and aloof classical colleges and as a response to popular demands for expanding opportunity and utility in higher education. Land-grant college histories are often framed within the social milieu of Jacksonian democracy, and the origins of the movement are represented as an outgrowth of the increasing participation and influence of the common man on American education, politics, and culture.¹⁶ Yet, as evidenced by Justin Morrill’s chilly encounter with the grange, this thesis does not fully explain the origins of land-grant education in the northeastern United States, nor does it clarify the motivations of Justin Morrill and other land-grant leaders.

The traditional interpretation of the land-grant college movement has its genesis in Earle Ross’s Democracy’s College. He argued that the movement’s motivating influence … has been that of popular determination and direction—a democratic system according to the expanding conceptions of the term.¹⁷ The nineteenth-century college is caricatured as inaccessible and useless to the working masses, and, as such, the Morrill Act becomes the culmination of public pressure for a more egalitarian and utilitarian education system. Democracy’s College provides rich details of land-grant colleges across the nation, but Ross’s popular demand conclusions are at best limited to a subset of western institutions in agricultural states. Indeed, Ross’s interpretation seems to follow the histories of the Iowa and Michigan land-grant institutions (on the former, he wrote a stand-alone history), which were ideal types of the narrow-gauge model, with vocational curricula, open access, and practical farming faculty. For thirty years, historians like Edward Eddy, Allan Nevins, and J. B. Edmonds relied on Ross’s framework. Eddy exclaimed that the land-grant colleges emerged from a gradual public awakening to the promise of higher education, and Nevins describes ubiquitous opposition to the classical colleges and ardent support for federal intervention in higher education. Behind each work is the linear, evolutionary march of democratic progress, where the common man achieves increasing access to the power centers of society.¹⁸

In the more skeptical 1960s, Frederick Rudolph suggested that democratic pressure may not have been central to the Morrill Act’s origins. After consulting numerous institutional histories, he argued, All these [land-grant] activities owed little if anything to the views of dirt farmers and workingman associations.… They were the work of middle class reformers.¹⁹ In a similar vein, in a 1981 article, Eldon Johnson wanted to clear up misconceptions about the early land-grant colleges. If there was broad popular demand for land-grant colleges, he pondered, then it should be reflected in enrollment data. But Johnson counted few land-grant students in the early years, and almost none studying the practical subjects of agriculture and mechanical arts.²⁰ In George W. Atherton and the Origins of Federal Support, Roger Williams moved land-grant history decidedly away from the democratization thesis, contending that land-grant colleges existed not because the institutions were destined to do so in response to some vague national demand, but because certain individuals were resolved to create the means. Williams gave names to Rudolph’s middle class reformers—George Atherton, Henry Alvord, Henry Goodell—and illustrated how a network of scientists, academics, and statesmen influenced the movement at the federal level.²¹ His book proved to be a significant contribution; it explained the processes by which the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 garnered federal support, and it exposed the flimsy foundation of the traditional narrative.

In addition to these shortcomings, the traditional land-grant canon provided few insights into the experiences of African American and female land-grant students. Ross and Nevins largely ignored the separate land-grant system for African Americans in their analyses, and Eddy tried to fold the historically black land-grant colleges and universities (HBCUs) into the democratic narrative. He stated that the Morrill Act of 1890 accomplished for Negroes of the South what the first act in 1862 had accomplished for the men and women of other races.²² This is a dubious conclusion. The Morrill Act of 1890 seems progressive on race at first blush, in stipulating that federal funds would only be dispersed to states that made accommodations for African Americans. However, the law did not require racial integration and therefore gave passive acquiescence to a separate and unequal southern land-grant system. A portion of federal funding was delivered to land-grant HBCUs, to be sure, but state legislatures then deprived them of appropriations that were flowing to white land-grant colleges. Nevertheless, the land-grant HBCUs were often the only providers of elementary, secondary, and higher education in many southern locales, and although underfunded for the monumental task at hand, these institutions contributed to advancing African American literacy and developing the foundation of a black middle class.²³

In the North, African Americans attended land-grant institutions in token numbers before the turn of the nineteenth century. Although these pioneers confronted racist attitudes, they did have full access to the curriculum and university facilities and were able to participate in literary societies and athletics. As their numbers grew in the twentieth century, however, black students encountered increased hostility, including blackface, minstrel shows, the presence of campus KKK organizations, and exclusion from campus activities, housing, and dining halls. The land-grant college clearly was not a romantic, democratic utopia of racial harmony but was instead a mirror of the racial and social prejudices of society.²⁴

The traditional land-grant historiography also fails to capture the movement for coeducation and the experiences of women at land-grant institutions. As I have stated previously, historians have struggled to integrate the utilitarian foundations of the Morrill Act with women’s aspirations and experiences.²⁵ Historians have been puzzled as to why women would have attended utilitarian land-grant institutions. For example, Edward Eddy posited that the new education was structured to prepare men for the workforce and offered little to women, whose place was considered to be in the home. Older works framed all land-grant colleges as primarily vocational enterprises, and since women were barred or discouraged from many careers, it was assumed that land-grant colleges would be unattractive to female clientele. Ross argued that land-grant colleges tried to accommodate women’s interests, but the difficulty was to provide a technical education adapted to women’s needs and opportunities.²⁶

Although women have not often fit into historians’ a priori constructs, the fact remained that female students attended and graduated from nineteenth-century land-grant colleges in substantial numbers. First were the pioneering women who arrived in the 1860s and 1870s to face a hostile environment. No accommodations were made for the young women’s arrival, male students resented their presence, and faculty worried that coeducation would tarnish the prestige of the institutions. As a wave of second-generation women arrived across the region, demands for equal access to curricula and facilities grew. Heartened by growing numbers, the young women organized their own extracurricular activities and worked with deans of women to improve housing, academics, and social opportunities. Andrea Radke-Moss explains this phenomenon well, stating that the experience of land-grant women was a negotiation of gendered spaces, where female students pursued both inclusion and separate spaces to meet educational and social needs. This resulted in their increased entry into the full breadth of the collegiate curriculum and the reorganization of the separate domestic courses into science-based home economics.²⁷

Common to all the critiques outlined here is a healthy skepticism that the Morrill Act can be interpreted as a uniform expression of the popular will. Revisionist scholars like Eldon Johnson found little evidence of grassroots pressure from white working farmers demanding the creation of the land-grant colleges, and the legislation was hardly crafted as a response to the educational desires of women and African Americans. Frederick Rudolph and Roger Williams appear closest to the mark by, in the words of Rudolph, linking land-grant origins with middle class reformers who were prepared to advance some theoretical and ideological notions of what popular technical education should be. However, this argument has been pushed too far, as Roger Williams’s George W. Atherton and the Origins of Federal Support seems to remove the people out of land-grant history altogether. While reformers George Atherton, Henry Alvord, and Henry Goodell played critical roles in shaping the movement at the federal level, histories of great men of the land-grant movement do not answer how the fledgling land-grant colleges were built and sustained at the local level. How did the people—the farmers and workers of mid-nineteenth-century America—respond to the Morrill Act? How did they interpret its key provisions? Since 90 percent of building funds had to come from the states, how did the masses respond to requests for state appropriations to support the land-grant experiment? How did these popular views of land-grant education diverge from or coalesce with the pronouncements of Rudolph’s middle class reformers? Popular demand may not have been the progenitor of the Morrill Act, but that would not prevent the people from laying claim to these institutions after they were founded.

To capture a more complete picture of land-grant development, postrevisionist scholars have attempted, in Roger Geiger’s words, to uncover the complex interactions between the people and academic reformers. In American College in the Nineteenth Century, Geiger explains how the concept of useful knowledge was debated and defined between 1840 and 1880. Groups representing farmers and workers tended to advocate for a practical, vocational definition of useful knowledge, whereas academics pushed for scientific and theoretical courses that prepared managers not workers.²⁸ This concept was expanded in Creating Colleges of Science, Industry, and National Advancement: The Origins of the New England Land-Grant Colleges, where I concluded that advancing scientific knowledge and economic development were the fundamental interests of the originators of the land-grant movement. Scientific discovery could lead to profitable technologies and, according to Justin Morrill, enable the United States to best Europe in the great race for mastery. Graduates of scientific programs could employ new technologies and managerial techniques in agribusiness, engineering, railroads, telegraph, and electrification, to name a few areas.²⁹ In Ivory Towers and Nationalistic Minds, Marc Nemec makes a similar argument, stating that in addition to the economic contribution of supplying managers, scientists, and engineers, land-grant graduates also filled the ranks of a fledgling American bureaucracy. In an effort to manage the complexity of a modernizing nation-state and political economy, the bureaucracy increasingly relied on merit over party loyalty and patronage, and land-grant graduates joined executive agencies to monitor and support the development of agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, and transportation.³⁰ The works cited here contribute to a reinterpretation of land-grant history. While the forces of mass democracy were pressing for change in society generally and higher education specifically, this movement confronted bourgeois and state-building interests resolved to erect a modern political economy. In a history of populist encounters with midwestern and southern state universities, Scott Gelber fully explicates this dialectic. He argues that the emergent public higher education forms represented the product or accommodation of a tension of grassroots advocacy and academic authority.³¹

In this history of the Yankee land-grant colleges, the tension described by Gelber becomes an overarching schema, uniquely fit to explain the land-grant reform campaigns of the late nineteenth century. Many northeastern states chose preexisting colleges as Morrill Act recipients, and, as such, these institutions tended to maintain traditional collegiate standards and invest the influx of federal funds to build scientific programs. Some of these enterprises were heralded by academic leaders like Daniel Coit Gilman as land-grant exemplars, well suited for advancing scientific knowledge and educating the leaders of a modern economy and nation-state. When Yankee farmers began taking an interest in the Morrill Act in the 1870s, they discovered that their views of