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The Land-Grant College and the Wave That Wasn’t

A farm boy from East Lansing wrote to the new agricultural college there with a plan for his own education: “As soon as the wheat is sown, I am at liberty to go to school” (quoted in Rudolph 1990, 265). That sentence is the whole land-grant idea in miniature, education slotted into the actual rhythm of actual work, offered to a young man nobody had previously imagined belonged in a college at all. It is also, I want to say up front, not quite the story Michael Crow and William Dabars tell about this moment, and the gap between the two versions is where this entry actually lives.

The Act and the Numbers

Justin Morrill’s land-grant act became law in 1862, in the middle of a war, and it gave each state thirty thousand acres of federal land for every member of its congressional delegation, to be sold off and the proceeds used to endow at least one college teaching, in the Act’s own phrase, agriculture and the mechanic arts. Sixty-five colleges were eventually established under the original Act. A second Morrill Act in 1890 added direct federal funding along with a nondiscrimination clause, which in practice produced sixteen new, separately funded Black land-grant colleges across the South rather than integrating the existing ones.

Crow and Dabars, whose whole institutional argument depends on this moment, quote former University of California president Richard Atkinson and his colleague William Blanpied calling the land-grant colleges “the first quasi-research universities in the United States” (Atkinson and Blanpied, quoted in Crow and Dabars 2015, chap. 2). Elsewhere they invoke Donald Stokes’ concept of Pasteur’s Quadrant, the happy convergence of fundamental understanding and practical use in a single research program, as the standard against which the land-grant achievement should be measured (Stokes 1997, cited in Crow and Dabars 2015, chap. 1). Together these citations build toward a clean epistemic advance, the land-grant college as an early instance of the very fusion Crow and Dabars want their own Fifth Wave university to complete. I don’t think this is false so much as it is tidied. And Frederick Rudolph, who spent a career in the actual documentary record of this period rather than building a framework on top of it, shows you exactly what got smoothed out in the tidying.

How “State College”?

Rudolph’s own description of the land-grant college’s cultural weight is worth sitting with before any argument about its intellectual content: “State College” carried “as homely and honest a ring about it as any of the numerous institutions identified with agrarian America,” evoking, in his list, “State Fair. Fourth of July picnic. Church social. Saturday night in town” (Rudolph 1990, 265). This is not a description of an emerging research enterprise. It is a description of a folk institution, freighted with the mythology of the self-reliant yeoman farmer, doing as much symbolic work as educational work. Rudolph is direct about the consequence: the land-grant college “made little effort to achieve a happy union between theory and practice,” choosing instead to become, in his words, “the temple of applied science,” institutionalizing “the American’s traditional respect for the immediately useful” (Rudolph 1990, 266). Read that against Pasteur’s Quadrant. Crow and Dabars want the land-grant college to occupy the sweet spot where fundamental understanding and practical use meet. Rudolph’s land-grant college mostly abandoned the fundamental side of that equation on purpose, and called the abandonment a virtue.

Cornell is the case that should settle this, since it’s the one institution everybody, Crow and Dabars included, points to as the land-grant idea’s vindication. And Cornell’s own founding was not a clean synthesis at all, but an argument between two men who wanted different things. Ezra Cornell, a self-made telegraph magnate, thought of his university as a trade school. Andrew Dickson White, the young state senator Cornell chose to run it, had to talk him out of it, convincing him the institution should instead train what White called “captains in the army of industry” (Rudolph 1990, 267). Even the exemplar was contested from its own founding conversation. And the contest didn’t end there. In 1873, four years after opening, Cornell found itself simultaneously “attacked for debasing classical studies and investigated for neglecting agricultural and mechanical studies” (Rudolph 1990, 267). Not sequentially. At the same time, from opposite directions. The institution Crow and Dabars hold up as the land-grant idea’s proof of concept was, within half a decade of its founding, failing to satisfy either of the two constituencies its own founders had tried to reconcile.

I don’t think this makes Cornell a failure. I think it means the fusion of theory and practice Crow and Dabars need this era to have produced was never actually achieved, at Cornell or anywhere else, so much as it was permanently argued over, and Crow and Dabars needed the argument to read as an achievement because their whole book is building toward the claim that a fifth such achievement is now underway at Arizona State.

Cornell was not even alone in this particular confusion. Rudolph notes that Michigan was “attempting to marry the practical and the theoretical” in exactly the same years, trying simultaneously to attract farm boys to its classrooms and scholars to its faculty (Rudolph 1990, 269). Two institutions, in two different states, running the identical unresolved experiment at the identical moment, is not evidence of a wave cresting in an orderly sequence. It is evidence that nobody involved actually knew yet what a land-grant institution was supposed to become, and each one was improvising an answer in isolation from the others.

Gold Standard Confusion

If you think this confusion was a Third Wave problem that Fourth Wave then cleanly resolved, Rudolph’s account of Johns Hopkins should unsettle that too, because Hopkins was founded, argued over, and staffed during precisely the same years Cornell was fighting off its own critics. Johns Hopkins was incorporated in 1867, its founder’s will probated in 1874, and between 1874 and the university’s actual opening in 1876, its trustees “could find no agreement on what a great American university ought to be” (Rudolph 1990, 269). This is the institution Crow and Dabars treat as the clean arrival of the German research ideal on American soil. Rudolph shows trustees who spent two full years unable to settle on a definition, weighing Yale’s cautious separation of graduate from undergraduate work against Harvard’s opposite instinct to dissolve that boundary entirely, before finally landing on the German model, partly on the advice of Michigan’s president, who simply argued that whatever they chose ought to be something new. Even once Hopkins settled on graduate research as its core identity, it still had to add an undergraduate department it did not really want, “as a public-relations gesture to the people of Baltimore,” who would not have tolerated all that railroad money going toward what Rudolph calls “rarefied scholars” and nothing else (Rudolph 1990, 270). The supposed Gold Standard, in other words, was hedging its own bet against local political pressure from its very first faculty meeting. Third Wave and Fourth Wave were not two waves. They were the same eight or ten years, the same handful of university presidents writing letters to one another, the same unresolved argument playing out in Ithaca, Ann Arbor, Baltimore, and Cambridge simultaneously, each institution guessing at an answer none of them yet possessed.

Jaspers and the cost of the wave metaphor

Karl Jaspers gives me the exact tool for testing whether something like Cornell achieved integration or merely addition. His standard, laid out in his chapter on the university’s expansion, is not whether new subjects get added to old ones, they always do, but whether the university succeeds in “transforming and assimilating the new materials and skills and integrating them in the light of a few leading ideas” (Jaspers 1960, 89). Absent that integration, expansion just produces what he calls, memorably, an intellectual “department store”: fields sitting next to each other as equals with nothing organizing their relation (Jaspers 1960, 88).

By that standard, Rudolph’s Cornell looks less like Pasteur’s Quadrant and more like exactly the diversified emporium Jaspers warns against: agriculture, mechanics, Greek, and bridge-building coexisting under one roof because White had the ambition to gather them there, not because anyone had worked out the leading idea that would integrate them. The 1873 double investigation is what a department store looks like from the outside, two different constituencies, each checking whether their own aisle is being adequately stocked, neither particularly concerned with whether the whole store adds up to something.

Here is where I think the real disagreement with Crow and Dabars lives, and it is not really about the land-grant colleges at all. It is about the wave metaphor itself. Waves imply sequence: one crests, recedes, and the next one arrives to do what the last one could not. But Rudolph’s next chapter, on what he calls the flowering of the university movement, shows Cornell’s land-grant vocationalism, Johns Hopkins’s German-style graduate research ideal, and Harvard’s elective-driven dissolution of collegiate boundaries all fighting for the word university at the same historical moment, incompatibly, with no agreement in sight (Rudolph 1990, 717). That is not two waves in sequence. That is the crashing of waves into each other from different tidal banks. That is one confused, contested decade in which nobody, including the people running these institutions, knew which model was going to win. Crow and Dabars need the sequence to be clean because their whole argument is that Fifth Wave is the next necessary swell in an orderly historical progression. 

If Third Wave and Fourth Wave were never actually sequential, if they were the same argument happening in the same rooms at the same time, then the wave metaphor isn’t describing history. It’s authorizing a future.

I want to be fair to what the land-grant colleges actually did accomplish, because Ortega gives me a way to say something true on their behalf that Crow and Dabars’ framework doesn’t quite reach. Ortega insists that culture, properly understood, is “the vital system of ideas of a period,” not an ornament but the actual working map a generation needs to live inside its own historical moment (Ortega y Gasset 1946, 44). Whatever else it failed to integrate, the land-grant college did take seriously a question the old classical college had simply refused to ask: what does a farm boy in Michigan, or his equivalent anywhere else in an industrializing continent, actually need to know in order to live his own life at the level of his own time? That is a genuinely Ortegan question, and the old-time college, as I showed you last entry, had no interest in asking it of anyone who wasn’t already headed for the ministry, the law, or medicine. The land-grant college’s failure was not that it asked the wrong question. It was that it never did the harder work of building a vital synthesis out of the answer, choosing instead, as Rudolph shows, to let the practical and the theoretical sit unintegrated, side by side, the way a department store lets barbers’ supplies and bridge engineering sit on adjoining shelves.

There is a version of this story, and I think it is the version Crow and Dabars actually want to tell, in which the land-grant college’s refusal to integrate theory and practice was itself a kind of vital response to its moment, a culture answering the only question that mattered to the people it was actually serving. I don’t think I can fully dismiss that reading. A farm boy who could go to school only after the wheat was sown did not need a unified theory of knowledge. He needed chemistry that would improve his soil and an institution that would not punish him for arriving late in the term. Measured against that need, the land-grant college’s practical bias was not a failure of nerve but an honest answer to an honest question. Where I always part from Crow and Dabars is not in crediting the land-grant colleges with having met a real need. Rather, it is in their insistence that meeting a real, narrow, practical need is the same achievement as Pasteur’s Quadrant, the genuine fusion of fundamental understanding with considered use. Rudolph’s evidence suggests the land-grant colleges mostly chose one side of that quadrant and called the choice a synthesis. That is a smaller and more honest accomplishment than the one Crow and Dabars want to claim on their behalf, and I think it deserves to be described at its actual size rather than borrowed to justify a much larger claim about what comes next.

Where this leaves the sequence

So here is where I actually land, and I want to say it plainly rather than let it stay implicit. The land-grant college was a real and, in Ortega’s sense, a genuinely necessary corrective to a curriculum that had ignored an entire population’s actual historical situation. It was not, on Rudolph’s own evidence, the clean epistemic advance Crow and Dabars need it to have been, and the institution they point to as its proof, Cornell, was contested at its founding and under fire from both directions within five years of opening its doors. None of that makes the land-grant experiment worthless. Instead, the reconsideration calls us to recognize the wave metaphor as unreliable, a retrospective tidiness laid over a mess that never actually resolved itself, only kept arguing in new institutional forms: Hopkins against Cornell against Harvard, all at once, all through the same crowded decades Rudolph actually documents.

That unresolved argument is exactly where the next entry has to begin. What Crow and Dabars call the Gold Standard (2015, chap. 2), the emergence of the American research university proper, was not waiting patiently offstage for Third Wave to finish its work but was already in the room, already arguing, before Third Wave had even settled what it was.

References

Crow, Michael M., and William B. Dabars. 2015. Designing the New American University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. eBook.

Jaspers, Karl. 1960. The Idea of the University. Edited by Karl W. Deutsch. Translated by H. A. T. Reiche and H. F. Vanderschmidt. Boston: Beacon Press.

Ortega y Gasset, José. 1946. Mission of the University. Edited and introduced by Howard Lee Nostrand. London: Routledge.

Rudolph, Frederick. 1990. The American College and University: A History. Introductory essay by John R. Thelin. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Originally published New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.

Stokes, Donald E. 1997. Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.