Morrill Land-Grant Acts

Because most of the HBCUs were founded between 1865 and 1900.

And this Morrill Act, the second Morrill Act, basically said this.

It's like, look, we know that There's a lot of, you know, there's Jim Crow.

There's all of this going on.

The boomers were the first generation that went... went to college, right? The whole GI Bill, we made it affordable.

I mean, if the land-grant school system, the Morrill Act, democratized higher education in the 1800s, what made it for the masses was the GI Bill and then the whole post-World War II time frame.

And all of a sudden, by the 60s, you got all these kids going to college.

And by the way, that's where the boomers all burned their draft cards and took their bras off and decided they'd change the world, which is one of the reasons, if you want to get on generational hate, I can hate the boomers probably as much as anybody.

[laughs]

Was that the Morrill Act?

[laughs]

It was-

...

the second...

Yeah, the 1890 was the second Morrill Act.

Yeah.

and struggles for money.

And in 1862, in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which was really the first time the federal government provided financial subsidies for higher education.

And in order to qualify, California had to have a university that would be a school of mining and agriculture, which were the two industries that were being supported by the Morrill Act.

So they end up taking over the College of California, which has just bought land in this hinterland north of Oakland where there was nothing, which became, and in fact, they named it Berkeley.

And so it was the sort of early founders who saw it as, you know, part of that effort to develop a society in San Francisco and in Northern California for, as all of these people pour in, not just for the gold rush, but to take advantage of the gold rush.

I do think that we'd be incomplete if we didn't just briefly mention in the U.S. context, of course, the land grant acts of the second half of the 19th century are, I think, highly relevant both to what REACH is doing, but also to the the sort of compromise that we've reached after sort of some back and forth.

You know, in 1862, the Morrill Act was passed, and this idea is that the search for knowledge and the demands of practical life belong under one roof in one kind of institution.

But just as the sort of Humboldtian research university tried to put research and teaching under one roof and was imitated by the American places like Chicago and Johns Hopkins and arguably perfected here in the sense that we then... came to have, after World War II, this huge constellation of world-class research universities.

But just to quickly be specific, you have a place like UC Berkeley, from my hometown, founded as California's land-grant college.

The Office of Education emerges much later, and the Department of Education not until the 20th century.

The Morrill Act of 1862 is another high point in the history of higher education, where the federal government again sets aside, uh, land and allows states to use the revenue from that land to fund higher education.

And the Morrill Acts created what are now called the land grant universities, which still, you know, which are still vibrant institutions today.

And, and that was Morrill, M-O-R-R-I-L-L, not, um-

Not like the mushrooms.

You just push from the inside, right? And you say, "This is not good." Like, in Iowa, we don't have any native reservations.

[lip smack] What we have is the Meskwaki settlement, and the Meskwaki had to buy back their land after being pushed out, right? So rethinking about this history and its problems and acknowledging them and, you know, respecting the, uh, w- what has been lost and, and, and the voices of those who have lost in, in, in this long-term process are created after, uh, you know, after the Morrill Act of 1862, in the eastern part of the United States actually received what is called scrip, uh, which basically means they were go- they were given land elsewhere in the West.

So like Rutgers got land in Iowa, for example, because, you know, New Jersey was settled, right? [chuckles] And so, um, so, so acknowledging this history and the benefits the universities have received from these systems and thinking about how to address these inequities, uh, to me is how we move forward.

If I could just say something real fast.

It's really interesting time right now because I feel like I'm seeing a lot of calls for kind of reinvestment in public education, public universities as kind of the response to the crisis or whatever [chuckles] we wanna call it that u- that universities are in right now.

And one of the things that comes up a lot is actually like reinvestment in specifically the land-grant system.

And so I think it's, like it feels like a really important conversation to have right now because actually just even on Blue Sky this morning, there was a specific thing about the Morrill Act, you know, and, and the land grants.

And so it feels like, you know, if, if there is an opportunity for reinvestment in that system to actually really try to figure out what the way forward is based on this, you know, sort of th- this painful history.