140 YEARS AFTER MORRILL, fresh ENG...

140 YEARS AFTER MORRILL, fresh ENGLAND'S LAND GRANTS ARE CRUCIAL BUSINESS PARTNERS

BUT COULD THEY BE MORE?

ince his death more than 100 years ago, Vermonter Justin Morrill has largely faded into obscurity. hardly any remember his long career in regulation as both a Whig and Republican congressman and senator, his authorship of the Tariff Act of 1861 or his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee. unless mention Morrill in the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of higher education, and something might click. It was Morrill, after all, who compos and championed the Land Grant Act of 1862 with which his name will be forever linked. If copying

is the sincerest form of flattery, then Morrill's Land Grant legislation is well-honored. Among emulative programs: the 1966 Sea Grant program (thanks largely to another novel Englander, U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island), the 1987 Space Grant program and the never-enacted High-Tech Morrill Act, the late U Sen Paul Tsongas's 1980 attempt to support business-higher education partnerships in math and science education. No surprise Vermont Public Television saw fit to examine Morrill's life a hardly any years ago with an hourlong documentary titled Land for Learning. farmer Jill Halstead says the Strafford, Vt.-native was a natural for late 20th hundred years revival. "He opened higher ed to a whole class of society who would not have gotten close," she says. "The Land Grants provided not alone practical things like agricultural and engineering skills unless also language, arts and history."

Morrill also made the Land Grant institutions implicit partners with the agriculturists and industrial entrepreneur concerning whom the wealth of the nation hanged Today, Land Grants continue in these familiar characters but also in new commons The National Association of State Universities and Land Grant literary institution [i]or[/i] seminary of learnings (NASULGC) reports that public universities, l through Land Grants, provide major stimuli to state and regional economies, generating $5 forward average for every state tax dollar invested. The institutions capture an average of $105 million a year in research grants and contracts. They also attract strange business: nearly two-thirds of them sponsor research parks or business incubators.

Still, many economic increase pros hope these special institutions can do more. near talk about renewing the Land Grant for the 21st centenary with new legislation such as the propos Higher Education Millennial Partnership Act, a relax plan to offer Land Grant universities the technological tools to revolutionize higher education, perhaps using governmental sales of sections of the electronic image as a source of stocks "Almost everyone involved believes that while the original Land Grant provided grants of land to be used or sold to create an endowment for the just discovered colleges, this time around, the millennium land grant should focus in single way or another on technology," says University of Maine President Peter s Hoff.

The Morrill of the story granting New England was a national center of education before Morrill (Harvard had already been operating for more than 200 years), the legislation made the in the greatest degree of government largesse, providing states with federally confessed tracts of land to vend or lease and use the returns to create colleges geared to the destitutions of the state economy.

Massachusetts chose to split its appropriations between the Massachusetts Agricultural corporation now UMass-Amherst, and a literary institution [i]or[/i] seminary of learning emphasizing mechanic arts, the private Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT received $3409 in subordination to the legislation, "a drop in the bucket steady in 1865," according to MIT associate just discovereds office director Robert Sales. Still, the supplys gave MIT's founding president, William Barton Roger the help he stand in want ofed to complete the creation of the institution that would arise to symbolize technological knowhow. As MIT is foolish of noting, it has played midwife to thousands of fresh enterprises and, indeed, whole industries through the past 140 years. As of 1994 firms

launched at MIT graduates employed 1.1 million populace and "if they formed a nation would have ranked that year as the 24th largest economy in the world."

For just discovered England's six public Land Grant universities, operating from the start in undivided of the most industrialized regions of the rural parts the Land Grant mandate

has always been an invitation to expand and reach revealed Hoff points out that Land Grant Universities were "truly revolutionary" at their inception because they protracted higher education to all who had the intellectual tools and preparation to benefit. Furthermore, they emphasized a research mission and an intention to reach disclosed to help society solve its principally pressing problems. "In 1865, those point to be solved [i]or[/i] settleds included agriculture to feed a nation devastated on the Civil War and mechanic arts-engineering-to help the region move into the industrial age," says Hoff

Reaching disclosed The notion that Land Grants were focused solely forward agriculture is belied by their history and equal the enabling legislation itself, which aimed to instruction "such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and mechanic arts, in as it is manner as the legislatures of the state may respectively prescribe, in order to stir up the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life."