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Land Grant University

Land grant universities (LGUs) exist in every state in the United States and form the backbone of public research and education in agriculture and food. Today, many LGUs are world-renowned centers of learning, including: Cornell University, Louisiana State University, Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University, University of California (Berkeley, Davis, and Riverside campuses), and University of Wisconsin-Madison, to name a few.

Origins and Components

LGUs began with the ideas of Jonathan Baldwin Turner, an Illinois College professor who campaigned throughout the 1850s to create a public higher-education system for the working class. Postsecondary education to this point had been largely an elite endeavor. Turner saw a need for an educational system that would provide broader access and enable subjects such as agriculture and engineering to be more relevant to the lives of most Americans.

It was Justin Smith Morrill, a Senator from Vermont, who introduced the bill in Congress. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act in 1862, interestingly after the South, the predominant agricultural region of the United States, had succeeded from the Union. LGUs were expanded with the Second Morrill Act in 1890 to include 17 historically black colleges such as Tuskegee University. Grants were of money rather than of land, but they gave the colleges LGU status similar to that of the 1862 colleges. LGUs were expanded again in 1994, when 29 tribal colleges and universities joined the complex.

The first LGUs were established soon after the Morrill Act. Under the act, the federal government granted each state 30,000 acres of land for each member of Congress from the state, thus granting more land to those states with larger populations. The states had the responsibility of using that land, and the income gained from its sale, to establish a university to educate its students in the agricultural and mechanical arts, but not to the exclusion of classical, scientific, and military studies. LGU research activities were bolstered by the Hatch Act of 1887, which created the Agricultural Experiment Stations as research centers to support agriculture and the well-being of the states' citizens. The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 established Cooperative Extension to convey the results of the universities' research to the general population. By 1914, then, all of the major components of LGUs—education, research, and extension—had been created. Although LGUs are public universities serving the constituencies of their home states, the U.S. Department of Agriculture plays an important role in the LGU complex by providing funding and directing research priorities.

Land Grant Universities Today

LGUs were originally created to provide education useful to farmers and tradespeople and to democratize education by expanding it from an elite experience available to very few people to a popular endeavor that would be relevant to practical professions. Today, LGUs still serve as major public academic educational institutions. Although they still teach agriculture and engineering, LGUs also continue to cover a very wide range of other disciplines.

The second purpose of LGUs is to conduct research oriented toward solving problems of interest to the public. The Agricultural Experiment Stations were created to facilitate this type of research, and LGUs today continue to conduct a great deal of basic and applied research. Research at land grant institutions is funded through a variety of sources, including a significant but declining amount of public funding and increasing funding from private sources. The annual U.S. Department of Agriculture budget includes over $1 billion for LGU research and Cooperative Extension activities.

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