With the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act next year, lots of higher-education leaders are praising the legacy of the law that created the nation’s land-grant universities. There is, however, considerably less enthusiasm from them when considering the future of those institutions.
A two-day conference starting Wednesday will feature more than a dozen speakers and panelists detailing how the universities—which began as centers of agricultural and engineering expertise for a largely rural population—have ballooned, in many cases, into selective research universities with global missions. The discussions are meant to use history as a way to gain perspective on the challenges the institutions now face, said Roger L. Geiger, distinguished professor of higher education at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, which will be the host for the event.
The discussions could hardly come at a more crucial time. Despite the successes of land-grant institutions, there is a cloud of uncertainty about what the next decade, let alone the next century, might hold for them. The most recent economic downturn has accelerated existing fiscal and political pressures on the institutions, roiling their relationships with state governments and other public colleges, and contributing to the recent departure of some campus leaders.
Penn State, for example, took heat from state lawmakers earlier this spring as it vigorously fought a proposed 50-percent cutback in its state support. While the budget debate remains unsettled, more recent proposals would cut Penn State’s appropriation by 25 percent. Meanwhile, several other states, including Nevada, North Carolina, and even Texas, are among many making double-digit cuts to higher education.
In Wisconsin, political tumult followed a controversial proposal that would have cut loose the state’s land-grant campus in Madison from the rest of the University of Wisconsin system, which strenuously opposed the measure. After a year of contentious relations, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin’s flagship, Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin, announced last week that she was leaving to become president of Amherst College.
The University of Arizona, that state’s land-grant university, is also losing a leader. After dealing with several years of deep budget cuts, the university’s president, Robert N. Shelton, is stepping down to assume leadership of college football’s Fiesta Bowl.
Protecting Their Mission
This is generally not the kind of uncertainty facing smaller and less-prestigious public institutions, which are dealing with basic questions of whether they will have enough classroom space and faculty to deal with spiking enrollment. Instead, land-grant universities are facing questions about whether they can preserve the core of their public mission: to provide broad and affordable access to education to the residents of their states, and remain focused on the applied sciences and agriculture.
Stagnant or declining state appropriations have forced many of the institutions to raise tuition far above the rates that other public colleges in their states charge. The full price of tuition at Penn State, for example, is more than $14,000 for residents; at the 14 universities in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, by comparison, it is less than $6,000.
Shrinking amounts of state money have also made land-grant universities more dependent on corporate and federal grants, as well as a variety of auxiliary ventures and outside businesses, including catalog and Internet sales, mailing-list rentals, travel tours, credit-card promotions, hotel and conference-center operations—even electric-power generation. The scope of those activities have raised questions about whether land-grant and other research universities are abandoning their focus on undergraduate education.
“Basically the state doesn’t support very much anymore, so universities have to go out and find partners to build their programs,” Mr. Geiger said.
While that statement is true of public higher education in general, the trend is specifically counter to the historical purpose of land-grant institutions, which were meant to provide an education in practical arts to students from across all economic classes. The mission of land-grant universities has already been “diluted” at many of the institutions, Mr. Geiger said, by an expansion of academic majors outside of applied sciences.
Perhaps the most endangered mission of the land grants is the extension service that used to support farmers and rural communities by disseminating practical information on best practices. While some states have begun reshaping the purpose and activities at those offices, many more have pared programs that rely on a triad of state, federal, and local tax dollars.
Even research in agriculture is being discounted in some scholarly circles. The University of Nebraska at Lincoln was voted out of the Association of American Universities earlier this year, in part because a large share of its federal research money is for agriculture. In its membership criteria, the AAU does not give such research the same weight as research in medicine, engineering, and hard sciences, because much of the federal support for agricultural work is awarded through formulas and earmarks rather than peer-reviewed grants. As a result, presidents of land-grant institutions say that the AAU metrics are stacked against them.
This week’s conference is intentionally including perspectives on agricultural aspects of the land-grant mission, Mr. Geiger said, because “quite often they are left out.”