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The Land-Grant Colleges and Universities in Human-Resource Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Mary Jean Bowman
Mary Jean Bowman
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

Mauriac, and probably several thousand other Frenchmen, have remarked that what worried them most about the United States and Russia was not the respects in which these countries differed but rather that they were fundamentally so much alike. If Mauriac had studied the history of the land-grant colleges and universities, he might have concluded that they were both the most Russian-like and the most thoroughly American sector of our education. Where else could one find schools so materialistically oriented or so (almost) successfully Jacksonian? To look at their history and their impact on American economic life over the past century is to examine a roaringly optimistic and an almost frighteningly successful endeavor to create the men—and the women—for a mass economy.

Type
Agricultural Education
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , December 1962 , pp. 523 - 546
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1962

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References

1 Richard Hofstadter and C. DeWitt Hardy put special emphasis on the significance of this report. Among other things, they cite from it as follows: “We are, therefore, forced to adopt the … supposition that our colleges are not filled because we do not furnish the education desired by the people … Is it not time to inquire whether we cannot furnish an article for which the demand will be, at least, somewhat remunerative?” The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1952), p. 25Google Scholar.

2 Hofstacker and Hardy, Scope of Higher Education, p. 21, stress the ready opportunities that “beckoned to young boys directly out of grammar schools and academies.” For an empirical analysis of such “opportunity costs” in more recent years, see Schultz, T. W., “Capital Formation by Education,” Journal of Political Economy, LXV1II, No. 6 (Dec. 1960), 571–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 On de-professionalization in earlier pioneer days see Boorstin, Daniel J., The Americans (New York: Random House, 1958)Google Scholar.

4 I owe the term “undifferentiated American” to Boorstin, The Americans. However, Boorstin applied this concept to an earlier stage in American history, on the eastern seaboard.

5 This approach was equally characteristic of Jonathan Baldwin Turner. I do not intend, in this reference to Morrill, to join in the battle as to who accomplished what.

6 The importance of the land-grant and state universities in development of public secondary schooling is especially stressed by Nevins, Allan in The State Universities and Democracy (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

7 The published figures are for ownership of farm property or equipment among alumni of the agricultural curriculum only. However, alumni of other curricula who were in any kind of agricultural or agricultural service employment were rare. Moreover, the ownership data include agricultural landlords engaged in nonfarming occupations. There is no reason to assume any downward bias in the 4 per cent figures.

8 Nearly all state universities established from 1850 on were coeducational from the start, and the earliest had therefore already set a precedent before passage of the Morrill Act.

9 Charles, AlfredTrue, A History of Agricultural Education in the United States, 1785–1925, U. S. Agriculture Dept., Miscellaneous Publication No. 36 (July 1929)Google Scholar. This is an invaluable document on many other matters relevant to this paper, though barely touched on here.

10 Eddy, Edward D. Jr., Colleges for Our Land and Time: The Land Grant Idea in American Education (New York: Harpers, 1956), p. 140Google Scholar.

11 I do not ignore the fact that salesmen, who are in the job of persuasion, may mislead. But it is hardly possible to question that the net effect of the activities of the land-grant alumni salesmen has been genuinely educational. It should be recognized, too, that human resources are not automatically developed by exposure to the “truth”; they are developed only when such exposures register.

12 The empirical validity of this observation and its central importance are stressed by Simon Kuznets in his Six Lectures on Economic Growth (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959)Google Scholar.

13 Everett Hagen has built an entire theory of economic growth largely around the “deviant” notion, which has become associated with his name. However, the proposition stated here implies acceptance of certain elements in Hagen's position only; it does not require acceptance of the theory as a whole.

14 For an empirical analysis that points in this direction, see, for example, M. J. Bowman and C. A. Anderson, “Concerning the Role of Education in Development,” in C. Geertz, ed., Old Societies and New States, in press, The Free Press.

15 With his research in Ghana, Philip Foster has broken fresh ground in the sharpening and specification of diis theme: Secondary Education in Ghana (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1962)Google Scholar.

16 Among other things, land-grant research and extension convinced hardheaded practical men that higher education could be worth supporting; often land-grant activities of these kinds provided the political base to sustain broader, less popular educational programs through periods of crisis. They could do this because, though they were utilitarian, the land-grant schools were also offering a general college education.

17 True, History of Agricultural Education, p. 164. This is a quotation from Mayer, Edward, History of Education in Mississippi, U. S. Bureau of Education, Circ. of Information, No. 2 (1899)Google Scholar.

18 For a careful and fascinating history of the Pestalozzi and Von Fellenberg schools, see Bennett, Charles Alpheus, History of Manual and Industrial Education up to 1870 (Peoria, Ill.: The Manual Arts Press, 1926)Google Scholar.

19 A more refined analysis would require consideration of locational differences among these types of schools as they are associated with variations in the base populations from which the students were drawn.