Morrill land-grant universities are iconic institutions that play important—even outsized—roles in both the experience and conceptualization of higher education in the United States. They are lauded for their contributions to research in applied sciences and efforts to bring knowledge and educational opportunity to the people. As Nathan M. Sorber's insightful Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt reminds us, though, they are quite often celebrated for what they have become, not for what they once were. Moreover, the competing influences that shaped them and the compromises that were made in their development belie some of the stories that we tell about them. Through his study of land-grant institutions in the Northeast, Sorber argues that the colleges evolved over their first fifty years amid significant class pressures, gradually accommodating competing claims for high-end science, agricultural improvement, and access to knowledge. Ultimately, these institutions took on the form of multipurpose state colleges, upheld academic standards that could limit access, and used cooperative extension to appease populist demands for practical knowledge. Throughout, they were battlegrounds over the future of the nation, its farms, and its economy.
Following a discussion of the importance of reconsidering land-grant colleges, Sorber provides an overview of science and higher education in the early republic and the antebellum period. Relying on revisionist scholarship, he highlights early scientific endeavors, the market revolution that followed the American Revolution, and calls for relevance in higher education. Although the 1828 Yale Report famously emphasized classical education as the most desirable, multipurpose colleges increasingly took hold in ensuing decades, especially in the West. They were joined by mechanics’ institutes, agricultural colleges, and extra-institutional efforts such as lyceums and scientific associations in advancing applied sciences. According to Sorber, these changes, combined with the influence of German universities, set the stage for the first Morrill Act and are partly responsible for the advances in US higher education that are often associated with it.
Sorber then provides a backdrop to the 1862 Morrill Act, the purposes behind it, and how it was implemented in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. In so doing, he demonstrates the multiple ways that states made use of funds from the sale of federal land scrip: New Hampshire, for example, funded historic Dartmouth College; Maine founded a new agricultural, engineering, and science college; and New York combined the funds with Ezra Cornell's gift to create a hybrid university. His discussion of Justin Morrill's upbringing and ideas is especially useful. In essence, he puts Morrill back into the Morrill Acts, showing that rather than being a champion of the people, he was a hardened businessperson who had little interest in creating opportunities for women, laborers, or freed slaves. As Sorber explains, “In time, land-grant colleges would expand access to higher education for generations of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, but Morrill's letters and speeches suggest that egalitarian notions were not the stated reason for his plan” (p. 50). The 1862 act was a land-use bill, but for Morrill it was one designed to promote science to help the United States compete with Europe, rather than to democratize higher education.
The middle portion of Sorber's book details the ongoing transformation of the colleges, including the influences of populist and grange-led efforts to reshape them to better serve a wider variety of people—though still predominantly white and male. The “popular revolt” in his title includes the successful efforts to remove land-grant funds from institutions in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire and to reassign them to institutions with more clearly practical and agricultural foci. Sorber mines these controversies to provide insight into the institutions and the larger society in which they operated, including demonstrating the centrality of class dynamics and financial concerns in the aftermath of the Panic of 1873. Even the newly funded institutions, though, soon transitioned into state colleges, despite grange opposition. The grafting on of substantial extension enterprises in the Progressive Era then came close to completing the model.
In Sorber's telling, the final element of the model was the establishment of coeducation, the subject of his penultimate chapter. In that chapter, Sorber wrestles with the confusion over why women would pursue higher education at institutions defined in part by their masculinity and covers the increasing emphasis on science in women's college curricula. As is the case in much of the book, socioeconomic class is prevalent in the discussion of women's experiences. At Cornell, most female students were scholarship recipients from rural communities and were looked down upon by the largely middle- and upper-class male population. At the University of Maine, fewer class differences eased access and acceptance. Even there, though, women had to carve out spaces to live and defend their academic choices at institutions commonly thought to be preparing men for jobs that women would not hold.
Sorber's focus on northeastern land-grant institutions is a strength of this work, as it allows him to complicate popular understandings of what land-grant institutions were and are. It reminds readers that early land grants were as much Brown University and Yale University's Sheffield Scientific School as they were Kansas State Agricultural College and the University of Wisconsin. It further allows him to show the effects of the regional social and political climate on land-grant colleges in the Northeast. This is a valuable contribution. At the same time, this regional focus complicates Sorber's efforts to provide a new framework for interpreting land grants writ large. If land grants were as much Brown and Sheffield as Kansas State and Wisconsin, the reverse is certainly true as well. They were also the all-white state colleges and universities in the South and the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) founded or funded through the 1890 Morrill Act. Coeducation might have been “the rule by the turn of the century” (p. 17) in the northeastern and midwestern land-grant colleges, but it was not in many of the 1862 colleges in the South. Moreover, Sorber's useful considerations of the masculine foundations of northeastern institutions does not capture the strong military elements present in the South.
All told, this is an important addition to the ongoing efforts to understand how ideas around and practices of land-grant institutions came to be in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It should be read by historians and others who are interested in how educational institutions intersect with, and at times are shaped by, class and cultural divisions. Perhaps even more, it should be read by the many people who populate and mythologize our land-grant institutions so that they can understand a more accurate and complicated past than the one that is so often celebrated. Only by understanding how they came to be, who they served, and who they did not, can we point to places where mythologizing not only does not help us, but can do a disservice both to individuals left out and efforts to make the institutions truly live up to their “democracy's colleges” moniker. Sorber's work goes a long way in furthering such an understanding.
