The History of American Higher Education by Geiger Roger L

Author:Geiger, Roger L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

LAND GRANT UNIVERSITIES

In 1868 Cornell University opened as the land grant institution of New York State. The following year Charles W. Eliot began his 40-year presidency of Harvard. And, in 1876 Johns Hopkins University opened, with Daniel Coit Gilman as president. In less than a decade, these three institutions consciously exemplified what would prove to be the principal facets of the American university. Cornell’s melding of academic and practical studies would characterize American state universities. Eliot oversaw the transformation of undergraduate and professional education at Harvard. And John Hopkins stood for research, graduate education, and the American PhD. The latter two developments will be the subject of the next chapter. State universities emerged from the land grant movement, but only after struggling to impose their definition of its meaning. Cornell, a product of the New York State Legislature but governed by a self-perpetuating Board of Trustees, would become the exemplar for land grant universities.35

Cornell University was both a direct product of the Morrill Act and the first American university to be dedicated to the new principles of advanced and practical knowledge.36 It became a unique amalgam of the ideas of its founders, Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White. This unlikely pair was brought together in the New York State Senate over the disposition of the Land Grant designation, originally directed toward two weak and suspect claimants. Instead Cornell and White collaborated to found a university endowed with Cornell’s fortune and shaped by White’s educational ideals. Ezra Cornell, a Quaker with little formal education, followed diverse occupations before participating in the early telegraph industry, which eventually brought him a fortune in Western Union stock. He became a gentleman farmer and state senator, active in the agricultural societies, and he resolved to devote most of his wealth to promote agricultural education. Andrew D. White graduated from Yale after acquiring an abiding disdain for classical colleges and a dream of an American university like Oxford and Cambridge. These ideas were honed by a European grand tour and the experience of professing history under Henry Tappan at Michigan. His university ideal was both aesthetic and intellectual but also completely open to the inclusion of practical subjects. Ezra Cornell made the university possible by donating his large farm in Ithaca and $500,000. Further, he multiplied the value of the land grant by purchasing the university’s land scrip, locating valuable timberlands in Wisconsin and holding the lands in pledge to the university as they appreciated in value. The university ultimately realized more than $5 million, almost ten times the average price per acre received by land grant schools. He was famously alleged to have said, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”37 White’s vision of a university included history, political science, modern literature, and high academic standards. Cornell University was wealthy enough to fulfill both visions.

The new university was predicated on the equivalence of agriculture, mechanic arts, and other professional studies with the liberal arts. White devised two broad

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