Thanks for the nice article. Just one small correction: The Gophers lost two weeks ago to the University of South Dakota Coyotes. It's an excusable mistake, since Nebraska had trouble with (although they didn't lose to) the South Dakota State Jackrabbits this past weekend.

I am deeply humiliated. They are both great schools AND they both have good football teams. A friend of mine went to the University of South Dakota and then to the London School of Economics. He will be razzing me. Bill Gleason

I was educated at a Land-Grant school--the University of Illinois. It was and is a great school, like all of the other ones that were started in the same manner. And while my major, English, is not "agriculture, science, or engineering," I benefitted greatly from matriculating at a place where those disciplines were given primary place.

There is a lot of research that goes on in a big institution of any kind, and to go where the best and smartest of your state attend school really makes you up your game. U of I formed me as a student, person, and ultimately as the academic I have become. There is nothing still like the rush I get when returning there, hearing the bells ring and seeing the rush of students--representing so many levels and types of intellectual activity--hit the quad to change classes.

Totally agree. I'm a proud Purdue graduate in Political Science and feel just as sdorley just stated.

"It is possible for a student to get a better education at the University of Minnesota than at St. Catherine or Northwestern Universities, or Carleton or St. Olaf Colleges..."

Are you not falling into the same 'quality ranking trap' that you are challenging? Or if this is your opinion based upon your own limited experience and not the experience of many others the above statement may be better understood as merely land-grant favoritism.

The Morrill Act(s) were not limited to education in "agriculture, science, and engineering," or designed to "concentrate" on them, but rather to add them as bona fide areas of study. They covered the arts and humanities as well, and were specifically aimed at ensuring BOTH a liberal and practical education to the industrial classes. Jane Robbins, Vanderbilt University

dakota1 - my reason for saying this was stated:

Minnesota excels in the depth and breadth of courses available to students. It simply is not possible, even for the Carletons of the world, to compete with that.

And I made a mistake by including Northwestern here. As an undergrad I took graduate level courses at Northwestern that would not be offered by Carleton, St. Catherine or any other excellent liberal arts colleges.

Jane - good points. It may have been better to say that the Morrill Acts legitimized "agriculture, science, and engineering" for study at higher education institutions. As earlier commenters have noted the land grant institutions not only cover these areas well but also things like English and political science. To give but one other example: the writer's workshop at the University of Iowa.

I'm an alum of Michigan State, and last year they sent me a survey asking how I felt about President Simon's plan to start calling us a "World Grant University." That is, of course, a totally meaningless phrase and an embarassment to the university, which has a proud land grand heritage. I told her so. I'm proud to have graduated from a land grant university. It doesn't need to become more than it is, and it certainly doesn't need a gimmicky new moniker that implies Land Grant is somehow not enough.

The author, like many in higher ed in my experience, misrepresents the 3 pillars of the land-grant mission, which are frequently distorted by those who wish to use this often misunderstood concept for their own ends. The 3 pillars are (a) expand the scope of the curriculum to include more practical subjects such as agriculture and engineering (accomplished), (b) open the university up to all individuals, not just the sons (just sons in those times) of the privileged (a work in progress); and (c) disseminate useful knowledge to the citizens of the state (accomplished). There was no assumption that the university would take responsibility for preparing its graduates for high paying jobs, and no explicit mention that the university should give preference to students from its home state, most likely because that was not an issue when the land-grant concept was formulated. One wonders too how long land-grant universities must be held hostage to a donated track of land in the 19th century, especially when today's financial support from the state that presumably benefits from its efforts is in the low teens and falling fast toward zero. It is a fantasy to believe that if universities focused more on what the author advocates that state legislators would increase funding. That is political naivete of the highest order.

One more correction, I'm afraid: The University of Iowa is not a land-grant institution; rather, Iowa State University (my undergraduate alma mater) is the land-grant university for the state of Iowa.

I share the affection expressed here for land-grant universities. After Iowa State I did master's degrees at two public but non-land-grant universities (one a major research institution where I'm now employed and the other a former normal school) and my Ph.D. at a different land-grant university. I strongly advocate the land-grant philosophy of integration of classical and applied study and engagement with the state at large and its people. Great cheese and ice cream from the university dairy doesn't hurt either.

A university cannot be all things for all people. That is why California developed a three-tiered system with the University of California at the top, California State colleges and universities in the middle and junior colleges at the bottom.

Public universities in other states are trying to offer the trappings of a selective university in order to attract better students and scholars while keeping low admissions tandards to please local legislators.

Here is what the Morrill Act actually says regarding curriculum:

"to the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life." (US Code, Title 7,sect. 304)

Looks like all those land grant universities need to maintain Latin and Greek also.

Expectations are quite high for its new president. It will raise the level of what we expect? Who knows, if you have the right person to fill this post?
http://www.all-auto.ro

The foundational elements of the land grant university have been and still are laudable and even worthy of duplication by developing countries (such as Vietnam) who are searching for ways to make their higher educational institutions relevant for their population.

There is a certain comfort in tradition and operating in ways which are familiar to us...regardless of the changes due to the passage of time. Most of the Ivy league schools which began as divinity schools have greatly expanded beyond the limitations of their foundation to maintain a continuity with the times. I would expect no less from a land-grant institution.

I would hope that in the attempt to maintain the specialness which is admittedly attached to land-grant schools, that there is also an openness to expand the reach of these universities to all parts of the world. The term global may merit some pejorative comments if attached to marketing campaigns but I would sincerely hope that the footprint of each land-grant university is not limited to just the main counties surrounding the campus.

With a Harvard-educated manchild at the U.S. helm, this article explains a lot. The challenge is merely getting accepted, it seems. Then the privileged ride to power begins. . .

Reinking-

Gordon Gee is not politically naive.

And neither am I...

Bill Gleason

Perhaps it's not due to naivete, but there is a huge gap in your story here: the states that are supposed to be benefitting from these land-grant schools have cut their funding drastically over the last 20 years. So the schools are having to seek external funding. That leads to a re-definition of the school itself. To get the big bucks from the NIH and NSF, you've got to show that you're focusing on that kind of research, that you've got the infrastructure in place to support it. You've got to attract the faculty who will pull in those dollars, and they don't want their research to take a back seat to the research being done in ag or engineering. Also, prestige of the institution plays a big role in getting those grants, whether it should or not. If states want their schools to focus on public service, they have to bite the bullet and provide public funding.

I'm surprised you brought up the U of M's athletic program. They lost again to Northern Illinois while the student section yelled for the firing of the coach. Even "Minneosta's Pride on Ice" is now found in St. Cloud.

"It simply is not possible, even for the Carletons of the world, to compete with that."

Perhaps not, but I bet Carleton students get a faculty member in the classroom a lot sooner.

As we become even more distanced from our agrarian roots, the original intent of land-grant institutions will continue to be obscured unless more attention is brought to their underlying purposes. I doubt that many of the students who attend these institutions are familiar with these purposes, and perhaps more than a few among their faculty and administration are also among the clueless.

At the risk of engaging in rah-rah, the University of Wisconsin (with Madison attached by hyphen from 1971) has a comparable record of scholarship for public service, aided by a progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century even more robust then neighboring states. Academics like John Bascom and Aldo Leopold, as well as one-time students like John Muir and Bob LaFollette come to mind.

As Gleason gently points out, the land-grant mission is in danger of being altogether appropriated, and likely not for nobler purposes. Certainly the rise of revenue sports has not benefited this mission beyond financing non-revenue sports like crew and lacrosse. The weekly ritual of tailgating at Camp Randall has replaced other campus gatherings over the past three decades. And while increasingly successful football and basketball programs have joined with the always solid ice hockey program to draw attention to the university among undergraduates, there has been a relentless drive toward research in the past several decades.

This is not to suggest any effort to abandon the mission; state outreach programs continue unabated. However, the expansion of academic programs, especially in the liberal arts, has come at considerable expense to core programs, and to faculty salaries more generally.

For decades, too, there has been near constant talk of reigning in research to allow more time for stellar professors to teach undergraduates with almost inconsequential results. Although I myself am an alumnus within the College of Letters and Science and though I've since gone on to postdoctoral studies elsewhere, I have always felt a sense of loss as the university strays further and further from its original mandate. (There are notable exceptions, including the Sino-U.S. Dairy Research Seminar and the Babcock Institute.)

I would also like to see a greater human and financial resource commitment to international development programs from these very same core programs. But this shift in priorities will first necessitate some unpopular and un-P.C. decisions that I'm not sure the current administration--with its added layers of bureaucracy--is unwilling to take.

Bill,
Very nice article. I concur with your argument. "Mission creep" has become a huge problem in higher education, with institutions expanding to be all things to all people. My own undergraduate experience was at a former normal school. Our faculty contracts reflected the teaching focus (60% teaching, 20% research, 20% service), and our students reaped the rewards.

My current institution (land-grant, but not flagship) is also engaged in a ranking race, one I am not sure can or should be won.
-Shawn

From Beer and Circus: How Big Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education:

"Clark Kerr went from the University of California to head the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and, in 1991, he published an important article comparing the rankings of the top fifteen research universities in 1906 with those in 1982. Considering the momentous changes in higher education during that time span, his findings were unexpected but, after analysis, were entirely logical: the rich arrived first and stayed on top, and no matter what the rest did, they could nvever overtake these institutions. In 1906, the early period of university research and graudate schools, Ivy League universities dominated the top fifteen list, and almost eighty years later, they continued to prevail. Similarly, the first private, non-Ivies that emphasized research and graduate education--Johns Hopkins, Chicago, MIT, Stanford--were still in the top fifteen, as were the first public universities that embraced research and PhD programs--Berkeley, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Predictably, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, almost all of these schools remain in the top echelon, with only Duke and Cal Tech now consistently joining them.

"Kerr titled his article, 'The New Race to be Harvard or Berkeley or Stanford,' and he began, 'All 2,400 non-specialized institutions of higher learning in the United States aspire to higher things. These aspirations are particularly intense among the approximately 200 research and other doctorate granting universities.' He then domonstrated that this race was a fool's errand for almost all participants. Additionally, it had negative side-effects for all schools, including the winners: the emphasis on research devalued undergraduate education, and 'the regrettable low status of teaching in higher education provides faculty members less reward from that activity than they expect to gain from heightened research' work.

"In his article, Kerr also discussed the phenomenon of 'Upward Drift': those universities, whether they could afford the cost or not, that relentessly added graduate and doctoral programs in order to compete in the research prestige race. . . .

"For an Upward Drift school to move higher in the prestige polls, it has to pass a more established research institution. But higher ranked schools are not standing still or drifting downward; in fact, they work hard to improve their positions in the polls. For example, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, with very tight budgets throughout the 1980s and 1990s, continued to pour millions into its graduate programs and to neglect its undergraduate ones. An editor of the University of Illinois student newspaper described the state of her campus in the late 1980s: 'It's clear that all the money is going to research. It seems so blatant when you see the run-down English [and other classroom] buildings and the fancy new research buildings. The U of I is really a research park that allows undergraduates to hand around as long as they don't get in the way.' . . .

"In America, because money measures the value of work, universities send clear signals with their pay scales. Before the 1970s, a few star professors received more money and perks than their colleagues; however, most faculty salaries were uniformly low but equitable, with years in rank as the main criteria. Upward Drift and the tight financial budgets of the 1970s and 1980s created a new pay scale: universities generously rewarded all professors who furthered the institution's research goals, and they gave the rest of the faculty--no matter how excellent their teaching--minimal raises. Similarly, they rewarded 'productive faculty,' a.ka. researchers, with such perks as personal research accounts, extended paid leaves to do research, and fewer, if any, undergraduate courses. Only faculty who became full-time administrators continued to climb the salary ladder, but not with the same speed as the outstanding researchers. . . .

"The major cost for universities was the pursuit of reseach prestige. A U.S. government report noted that 'research expenses at public colleges [and universities] increased 157% between 1981 and 1995,' most of it for salary raises for star professors and lesser reseach luminaries, as well as for equipment and other amenities to help academic departments try to move upward in the national rankings. Another huge and expanding cost was 'bureaucratic bloat': from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, the number of nonresearch and nonteaching administrators and staff rose by 8.3 percent nationally and, at many schools, by well over 100 percent.

"Addministrators fueled 'bureautic bloat' by employing more assistants, secretaries, receptionists, et cetera, and by encouraging academic departments to do the same--often to relieve research professors of contact with undergraduates. In addition, administrators allocated millions of dollars for buildings and grounds, in part to attract students to their schools (see page 56) and also to keep them happy while on campus. George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, made a typical move by constructing a new $30 million student center, containing a state-of-the-art movie theater and food court. This school and many others also poured millions into their intercollegiate athletic facilities, but much less proportionally into undergraduate classrooms and libraries."

Sperber, Beer and Circus: How Big Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education, pp. 72-74, 76, 93-94 (New York, Henry Holt & Co., 2000).

Michael W. McNabb
University of Minnesota B.A. 1971; J.D. 1974

Enjoyed the article and I share your affection for the mission of land grant universities. But I thought this was interesting:

"Many of the students who have worked in my lab have been accepted for graduate work at universities like California at Berkeley, San Diego, and San Francisco; Caltech; Stanford; Harvard; and Cambridge. If you go to a large public university and do well, you can write your own ticket."

So what you're saying is that a school like Minnesota - a land-grant U - is OK for undergraduate, but not for graduate work? The snobbery you rightly identify as misplaced in u-grad trickles down from the snobbery we attach to grad programs. I know lots of PhD's from Columbia and Chicago without a tenth of the ingenuity of some PhD's from land-grant U's, but guess who'll get the respect and the job offers?

The point I was trying to make is that our undergrads - at Minnesota and other land grant institutions are well trained enough that they, too, can get into the snob appeal schools.

I went to Minnesota for my PhD in chemistry.

And you'll notice in the list I included some land grant graduate institutions. As I understand it - correct me if I am wrong - the whole UC system is a land grant institution. Penn State, Ohio State, Illinois, and Wisconsin are land grant institutions is a very good engineering school, Purdue.

So don't be so defensive. You don't have to diss people from Chicago or Columbia. I'll also point out, as far as job offers go, the recent Wall Street Journal survey of recruiters is instructive. There the large publics, most of them land grants, were the favorites for recruiting. When I was at 3M they used to love people from the Dakotas because they were well trained and hard working.

Don't be so defensive.

I always thought the 3-fold mission was: education, research, extension.

I went to private colleges, but I still feel a strong personal connection to the Land Grants somehow. I have a great respect for the Land Grants as something essentially American, and that history makes me very proud. I also feel gratitude to them for the creation of knowledge that is actively shared with people who stand outside a particular discipline. Anytime I search on-line for information on something that fascinates me--insects, blue bird housing, winterizing my own housing, rocks, all sorts of things--I find great stuff that I can understand through state extension offices written by prof. so-and-so at the Land Grant. How lucky are we in this country? This is why I am a proud tax payer.

The University of Minnesota, like many others, was established as a land grant university in a model that was current in the 19th century. That should not (and in practice, does not) mean that its mission is fossilized in perpetuity. The UofM is the State's flagship center of higher education and today it has to compete in a global market of educational institutions for faculty, for students, for research funds, for external collaborations and so on. It's not possible, and, I would argue, not at all desirable, for an institution of its size not to be involved in the research mission, which, as it happens, is articulated in the 19th century terms ("Dedicated to the advancement of learning and the search for truth") that you quote. The notion that the land grand instituion of the 19th century should not have an active research mission in the 21st century makes no sense at all. If students in Minnesota want to go to a small liberal arts college, they have excellent opportunities in outstanding insitutions like Carleton College. But the State needs and expects more in this age from its leading university than delivering good education to students.

lux aeterna-

I think you have slightly mischaracterized - here and elsewhere - my message.

I argue that a land-grant institution should NOT be a slave to national and international rankings systems that are based primarily based on research. The Minnesota administration has set as its goal being one of the top three public RESEARCH universities in the world. This is unrealistic.

To say that I dismiss research as being essential to the mission of a university, indeed a land-grant university, is simply a mischaracterization of what I have said. My PhD is from a land-grant institution. Nobel class work is done at land-grant institutions.

My argument is based on priorities. And the educational mission of a land-grant institution should be equal to or greater than the research mission. This does NOT mean that there is not a place for world class research at a land grant institution.

et lux perpetua luceat eis