Uniting Labor and Study in the Michigan Agricultural College's First Generation

Autor/in	Lauzon, Glenn P.
Titel	Uniting Labor and Study in the Michigan Agricultural College's First Generation
Quelle	In: American Educational History Journal, 48 (2021), S.25-42 (18 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1535-0584
Schlagwörter	Educational History; Land Grant Universities; Agricultural Colleges; Federal Legislation; Educational Legislation; Labor; Study; Institutional Mission; Michigan + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? History of education; Bildungsgeschichte; Landwirtschaftliche Fakultät; Landwirtschaftliche Hochschule; Bundesrecht; Bildungsrecht; Schulgesetz; Studies; Studium
Abstract	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). Historians recognize Michigan Agricultural College (MAC, now Michigan State) as a notable exception to this general rule. Was MAC a narrow-gauge agricultural college or was it something else? How did the Michigan Agricultural College enact the Morrill Act's "liberal and practical education" mandate? To address that question, this paper investigates the time period from the 1850s to the 1870s. After performing a self-diagnosis of declining enrollment in the mid-1890s, the MAC faculty concluded that many people's ideas about their college did not correspond to what the college actually did. A "continuous campaign of advertising and education" was needed to convince people that MAC put the sciences and their applications at the center of its efforts "to develop all its pupils into broad-minded men, good citizens, and ideal farmers or mechanical engineers" (Edwards, Smith, Kedzie 1896, 63). Stated in terms of the narrow-gauge and broad-gauge classification, MAC aspired to be both, by striving to unite "labor" and "study." (ERIC).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2022/1/01