Article 3: Uniting Labor and Study in the Michigan Agricultural College’s First Generation

Historians of higher education generally agree on a handful of ideas about the early years of the land-grant colleges that grew out of the Morrill Act of 1862. For their first three decades, the land-grant colleges struggled to survive: lacking students, funding, and public favor. Charged, by the Morrill Act, to promote “the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes,” they were plagued by contradictory interpretations of how to implement the mandate (Act Donating Public Land 1862, 14). The land-grant colleges’ greatest challenge was agriculture. How could they entice students to study agriculture? What could they do about the (seemingly) relentless political pressures inspired by farmers who insisted that agriculture be the foremost of their priorities? The colleges simply could not deliver what farmers wanted. Too few people with college-going aspirations wanted to study agriculture and perform farm labor. Judged against their agricultural mission, land-grant colleges “could only be described as failures” in their opening three decades (Scott 1970, 27).