Public universities across the United States got their start through the sale of vast amounts of land — property that researchers say was largely stolen from Native Americans.
The Morrill Act of 1862 gave states thousands of acres of federal land to use for education funding. Large public universities across the country owe their existence to the countless parcels of land that were developed or auctioned off in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
A new project reveals an uncomfortable truth about the origins of land-grant universities.
But beneath the federal government’s seemingly generous donation to American higher education lies an uncomfortable truth: It was largely expropriated from indigenous peoples.
Robert Lee, a lecturer in American history at the University of Cambridge and a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, spent years reconstructing the parcels that gave land-grant universities their start. He and other researchers published a lengthy, data-rich investigation last week in High Country News, rebranding the colleges as “land-grab” institutions.
Lee says the investigation is only the first step in revealing the Morrill Act’s complicated history. He spoke recently with The Chronicle about the researchers’ findings. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Where did this idea — to really dig into the origins of the land-grant system — come from?
I was trying to understand the relationship between population movements and dispossession. I mapped all of the land patents in the Bureau of Land Management database, which is the chief source for our material. All of those land patents are broken down by law, and the Morrill Act is among them. I couldn’t work a whole lot on it at the time, because I was trying to finish my dissertation, but when I got to my postdoc, I started to look at it more closely. I put together what I had, and I did a talk at Harvard about it. I pitched for collaborators because it’s a big issue and requires a lot of time and resources. In the audience was Tristan Ahtone, my co-author on the piece. He was there as a Nieman fellow. He came up and spoke with me afterwards, and that’s where the High Country News project really took off from.
What sparked your interest in researching colonization and Native American lands?
My larger research is on the U.S.-Indian treaty system. What I’ve been trying to do is understand the process of expansion into the American West as a history of treaty-making with indigenous people rather than through the sort of normative imperial acquisitions that we think of when we think of U.S. expansion: the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican Cession, and so on. My interest in this stuff comes from good teaching on the American West. I’m from New York. I became interested in the West through a course in college. It just sort of steamrolled from there.
The High Country News project refers to some of your conclusions as “open secrets,” but did any of your findings surprise you?
Yes and no. When I talk to people about this project, there is not a lot of need for lengthy explanation about the logic of what is going on here. People sort of grasp that this issue took place. Even if they haven’t thought about it, they sort of understand that this is a part of U.S. history, and they’re not surprised by that. What they are surprised with, and what I was surprised with, was once you could actually see the footprint of the Morrill Act on the ground. All these things look obvious, although they weren’t beforehand. If you line up all the patents, there’s this sort of arc of parcels going basically from Missouri into Michigan. It looks sort of like a half-crescent. I hadn’t thought of it before, but it has a quick, obvious, and simple explanation: Those were the hot land markets at the time.
Another sort of big story that jumped out at me was the concentration of parcels in California. We knew there would be some in California, but the concentration is really astounding. And part of it is for the same reason: It was a hot land market at this time. What makes it sort of surprising and especially interesting, I think, is against the backdrop of the new scholarship on the history of the California genocide. Knowing that history puts the history of the Morrill Act in California in a whole new light.
Does the American public really grasps what “land-grant university” means?
People are familiar with the term. They often think it means that the grant provided the campus, the land that it’s on. Or if they think about it in terms of land being granted to the university, they think about it being sort of in the neighborhood. Not being hundreds or thousands of miles away. That part is really not so well understood.
Are many universities aware of whose lands are responsible for their existence?
Generally, no. We reached out to all of the universities that we cover in this piece. This was at a time when everyone was preparing for Covid-19, so it was a mixed response. Colorado State told us that this corroborated information they had. South Dakota State definitely understands where they’re from and where their lands came from. They have an initiative that redirects their funds from the Morrill Act to Native American students. Other places understand the indigenous nations whose lands their campuses stand on, but not necessarily the details of the Morrill Act, and most do not understand the details because they haven’t looked into it.
Is it enough for colleges to acknowledge the origins of the land-grant system? What else should they do?
Land acknowledgments have emerged and spread across the globe in the last 10 years or so, and they focus on acknowledging the land that the universities stand on. In the last few years, there’s also been criticism of land acknowledgments as more of a ritual than a call to action. Michigan State recognizes in their extended land acknowledgment that they are a land-grant school, that they received lands through the Morrill Act. Most do not. The first step, in my view, is acknowledging this history, coming to terms with this history, and incorporating it into land acknowledgments. But I don’t think it should stop there.
The way that we’ve designed this project is hopefully very useful for teaching. The digital component, the article, the methodology, the bibliography that we’ve included — these are all geared toward helping folks teach this issue. I think it will be valuable to land-grant universities. We have sort of provided a bird’s-eye view of the problem, and they have the documents that they could look at with students or other groups on campus to flesh out the full history of their connection to, and the use of, indigenous lands for funding their operations from the 19th century forward.
Are colleges changing how they teach about the Morrill Act?
The Morrill Act is often taught at ed schools. It might come up, briefly, in courses on U.S. history. But generally, until the last five years or so, the historiography didn’t lend itself toward teaching this issue. The core issue in the deep historiography of the Morrill Act has to do with the extent to which it lived up to its democratic promise. Questions about the sourcing of these funds just were not a question in the literature. If you wanted to teach about the Morrill Act, you couldn’t go to the library and find out about this information. But this has been changing in the past few years. Part of the hope is that this project pushes in that direction.
So where do you go from here? What are the next steps?
We’ve been doing training sessions with journalists in the hope that they would sort of drill in and write more-localized stories. We’re hoping that researchers will also reach into this data as a hub to build and conduct new research, that teachers will use it to teach. We’re going to continue to write follow-up stories. One of the big ambitions of this project is to bring in other people who might want to look into this issue. One of the reasons why we developed this as a collaborative project is because of just how massive it is. It’s larger than one person. It’s larger than one team of researchers.
So this is sort of just the tip of the iceberg?
Yeah, this is not designed to be the final word. It’s designed to be a sort of jump-start.
