Land-grant university

“ It is easy of access from the whole territory from which students are most likely to come, and the offer of the city to give $50,000 in money for buildings, twenty acres of land for a campus and professors’ houses, a half interest in the sale of 500 acres of land, and to furnish 200 students the first year, was a tempting offer. ”

“ No person will contend that donations of land to all the States of the Union for the erection of colleges within the limits of each can be embraced by this principle. It can not be pretended that an agricultural college in New York or Virginia would aid the settlement or facilitate the sale of public lands in Minnesota or California. ”

“ Where was the money to come from to build a University, to equip it properly, and to pay for professors? There would even be a difficulty in finding a site, for few land-owners in a central situation would be willing to promote the elevation of the coloured races. ”

“ Other educational agencies, such as the agricultural colleges and experiment stations, have profited by institutes. No one thing has done more than the institutes to popularize agricultural education, to stir up interest in the colleges, to make the farmers feel in touch with the scientists.
Farmers' institutes are a phase of university extension, and it is as a part of the extension [Pg 103] movement that they are bound to increase in value and importance. ”

“ Often of late we have had applications from employers for young men capable of assuming responsibilities. We keep track of the demand for youthful brains and university training, [484] and make a point of being always ready to supply it. A notable factor in the practical work of the university is the Agricultural College, which is located at Guelph, Ontario, and controls 550 acres of land, upon which all phases of farming are carried on and taught to nearly six hundred students. ”

“ This made a grant of public land to each state to establish a college for instruction in agriculture and the mechanic arts, and it has been the influence of the "land-grant colleges," more than any other agency, which has been responsible for our agricultural advancement. In 1888 the Hatch Act made an annual federal appropriation to each of these colleges for the establishment of an agricultural experiment station, whose investigations, with those of the United States Department of Agriculture, have been largely responsible for the scientific basis of modern agriculture. ”

“ Will they pass over to the control of the University a fair portion of the money they now spend either on scholarships and fellowships confined to boys from a few schools, or on the maintenance of choirs and tutors, or on new buildings? It is not enough that one or two colleges make a grant to support some workmen’s centre. Workmen will resent the patronage of a college. The money must be transferred to the University, the tutors must have a University standing, and the scholarships, which enable men to reside in Oxford, must be both ample and numerous. ”

“ University work in the maritime provinces, instead of being concentrated, as it might well be, in one powerful institution, is distributed among five small, but within their range efficient universities. The agricultural college at Guelph and the experimental farms maintained by the federal government give excellent training and scientific assistance to farmers. Sir William Macdonald in 1908 built and endowed, at an expenditure of at least £700,000, an agricultural college and normal school at St Anne’s, near Montreal. ”

“ The fathers of the country certainly did postulate a need of universities, and in every state Congress set aside public lands to furnish a university with material resources. Every State possesses a university, though in many instances these institutions are in the last degree of feebleness. In the days of sincere democracy the starvation of government and the dislike of all manifest inequalities involved the starvation of higher education. ”

“ To some extent this procedure may relieve the pressure on universities for uniformity of courses and degrees, leaving them free to develop in such manner as seems best. Scientific organizations, overlooking the entire field, are in a position to take into account the greatest variety of factors of training and experience in selecting their members. Failure of any university course to make men eligible for such recognition will obviously react on the course in a desirable way. ”

“ The university comprises eight distinct faculties and schools of matriculants under its council and, in addition, the summer-school and the woman's law-class, both made up of nonmatriculants who are enrolled without examination. The era of greatest development was from 1890 to 1900. In 1891 22 acres of land, now known as University Heights, overlooking Harlem River, were acquired. ”

“ The establishment of a university is, in my opinion, a matter alone for the future. At this time it is neither expedient nor is it good policy to provide for the sale of those lands set apart for the university fund. If at some future period it should be deemed expedient or in keeping with a more enlarged policy to devote our entire energies to a more general diffusion of knowledge than a university would afford, or even if the voice of the State should demand the establishment of one, these lands will then provide the means of advancing the cause of education. ”

“ The agricultural colleges have been handicapped from the first for lack of funds. It is now coming to be recognized that the highest kind of effort in these colleges cannot be sustained on a farm that pays for itself nor by means that are copied from the customary college work in "humanities" and "science." If it is to be efficient, agricultural education of a university grade is probably more expensive to equip and maintain than any other kind of education. ”

“ Thinking over my visit, during the return journey, I realized that the whole question of the relative usefulness of the metropolitan university and the rural college reduces to an estimate of the comparative values of the large and the small, the near and the remote, of efficiency and culture. Our national environment and history have emphasized the importance of the large, the immediate, the efficient. But there is always much to be said on both sides of every question, and it is at least possible that enough importance has not been attributed to the small, the distinctive, the fine. ”

“ The universities may be called upon to train teachers and investigators in rural social science for service in agricultural colleges, normal schools, and theological seminaries. Moreover, [Pg 225] there is no good reason why any college or university graduate should not know more than he does about the farm problem. There can be little doubt that the interest in the farm question is very rapidly growing, and that the universities will be but meeting a demand if they begin very soon to offer courses in rural social science. ”

“ But the fact remains that the college connected with the university is to have the broader field in the future. Its very connection dignifies it and gives it parity. It draws on many resources that the separate college knows not of, unless, indeed, the separate college develops these resources for itself. The tendency, therefore, is for every ambitious separate college to develop the accessory resources, in the way of equipment in general science, literature, the arts; for agricultural education is constantly coming to be of a higher grade. ”

“ The colleges were very generally placed in strict subordination to the university by their founders; but, in many cases, their endowment, consisting of land, has undergone an "unearned increment," which has given these societies a continually-increasing weight and importance as against the unendowed, or fixedly-endowed university. ”

“ Imagine a university and a campus of forty-seven acres of lawn and grove where Trinity Church stands in New York or where the post office stands in Chicago or St. Louis. In Washington we have something like it in the mall where the National Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Agricultural Department are. Trinity College, Dublin, has an equally expansive setting of green grass and grove and flowering shrubs, cricket grounds, and tennis courts, surrounded on all sides by business houses, clubs, and hotels. It is like an island of verdure in the midst of an ocean of trade and commerce. ”

“ Some day it will be felt as a loss and a crime if any one who could be an explorer is forced to become anything else. And even then, after countless ages of education and scientific progress, the true university will still stand on the shore, its walls still washed by the same unending sea, the boundless ocean of possible human knowledge.
The new growth of the American university which we honor to-day is simply its extension and its freedom, so that a scholar can find place within its walls. The scholar can not breathe in confined air. ”

“ There is, then, no foundation whatever for the assumption that it is the duty of our government to establish a national university. I venture to state one broad reason why our government should not establish and maintain a university. If the people of the United States have any special destiny, any peculiar function in the world, it is to try to work out under extraordinarily favorable circumstances the problem of free institutions for a heterogeneous, rich, multitudinous population, spread over a vast territory. ”

“ As each town would be represented by the products of the dairy, the herd, and the field, so it would be represented by its men; and the annual fair of the county would be a truthful and complete exposition of its industrial standing and power.
Out of a system thus broad, popular, and strong, an agricultural college will certainly spring, if such an institution shall be needed. But is it likely that in a country where the land is divided, and the number of farmers is great, the majority will ever be educated in colleges, and upon strict scientific principles? ”

“ The chief methods by which the public lands have been disposed of are as follows:
1. #Educational Grants.#—Congress from the very first provided liberally for the establishment of common schools through grants of public lands for this purpose. As each township is surveyed one quarter section of 640 acres is set apart for common schools. This has continued from the beginning down to the present time. In addition, large grants have been made specially for the endowment of universities. Within later years land has been given to every State to found State military and agricultural colleges. ”

“ It is an unusual institution of learning with a campus equally unique, for in its 25,000 acres are a forest, a mountain, and a lake and more than one hundred buildings which were not only erected by Berry students, but built from materials also made by them. Here mountain boys and girls express the fine spirit of independence inherited from their forbears. Once they enter the Gate of Opportunity, they earn their education. ”

“ It includes colleges of arts, philosophy and science, of education (for teachers) , of engineering, of law, of pharmacy, of agriculture and domestic science, and of veterinary medicine. It occupies a campus of 110 acres, has an adjoining farm of 325 acres, and 18 buildings devoted to instruction, 2 dormitories, and a library containing (1906) 67,709 volumes, besides excellent museums of geology, zoology, botany and archaeology and history, the last being owned jointly by the university and by the state archaeological and historical society. ”

“ It is fitting that the sunflower should bloom in a garden, and so it does. This time it is not a walled garden like that of Lal Bagh; the Women's College is situated out from the city in a green and spacious suburb, where the little River Cooum wanders by its open spaces. The ten acres have much the air of an American college campus,—the same sense of academic quiet, of detachment from the work-a-day world. ”

“ I establish my own free colleges and schools of law and medicine, and I proceed to tax all others at their full valuation." There is not a college in the country, not even Harvard, that could compete upon such terms. The state need not even express its sovereign will so precisely. It can content itself with establishing a university of its own, and facilitating the direct influence of this university over the public and private schools. ”

“ The 50-bushels-of-wheat acre is a grand business proposition provided the general industrial conditions favor the grower as well as the consumer. When our agricultural colleges enter into the fullest sympathy with all the rural problems, when the farm home and the rural school and the country church and the farmer's civic rights and duties and all the relations of his business to other industries—when these questions are "in the air" of our agricultural colleges, then and then alone will these colleges fulfil their true mission of being all things to all farmers. ”

“ The historic conditions of universities such as Harvard and Yale may make necessary their extension over an ever-wider territory, but it seems a pity that when universities must erect their buildings from the start, as has been necessary for Columbia and Chicago, there is not at hand sufficient artistic and educational imagination to plan a building that is beautiful because it best serves the purposes of a university. ”