What is a Land Grant University?
Definition:
We're so concerned with budgetary cutbacks and school closures these days that it's easy to forget that it wasn't always so. Back in the Civil War era, the United States Congress passed several far-reaching pieces of legislation designed to educate the nation's working and middle classes by opening universities. Under the Morrill Land Grand Act of 1862, the federal government granted 6.3 million acres of public land - 30,000 acres per member of congress - to create at least one public university per state.
The academic emphasis was to be agriculture, engineering, science and the classics. Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, was the first of the land grant universities.
This was wartime so the Morrill Act specifically excluded states that were rebelling against the federal government, i.e., the Confederate South. After the war ended, the act was amended to include the Southern states.
A second Morrill Act was passed in 1890 that granted funding - rather than land - to force states that had excluded African-American students from their public universities to build land grant universities for them. Most of the nation's historically black colleges and universities were opened with Morrill Act funding.
We're so concerned with budgetary cutbacks and school closures these days that it's easy to forget that it wasn't always so. Back in the Civil War era, the United States Congress passed several far-reaching pieces of legislation designed to educate the nation's working and middle classes by opening universities. Under the Morrill Land Grand Act of 1862, the federal government granted 6.3 million acres of public land - 30,000 acres per member of congress - to create at least one public university per state.
The academic emphasis was to be agriculture, engineering, science and the classics. Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, was the first of the land grant universities.
This was wartime so the Morrill Act specifically excluded states that were rebelling against the federal government, i.e., the Confederate South. After the war ended, the act was amended to include the Southern states.
A second Morrill Act was passed in 1890 that granted funding - rather than land - to force states that had excluded African-American students from their public universities to build land grant universities for them. Most of the nation's historically black colleges and universities were opened with Morrill Act funding.
Source...