Institutionalizing Agricultural Research in the Early American Republic: An International Perspective

“For this additional burden we had no additional help”: First-year composition and writing program administration at Iowa State from 1869 to 1939

“…They benefited from their practicality in the short-term, especially as the 1870s through 1890s saw nationwide upheavals against research university-styled land-grant colleges by populist pressure groups (Nelson, 2013;Sorber, 2018). Long-term, however, A&M colleges struggled to retain top-flight faculty and serious graduate students.…”

“…Two forces which did not fully align in universities until the end of the 1800s confronted the small college's prescribed curriculum: the elective curriculum and specialized research in academic disciplines, especially scientific disciplines. These forces began emerging in higher education before the land-grants were founded (Nelson, 2013), but they came to the fore while many land-grant colleges were just establishing themselves in the 1860s and 1870s. Discussing the rise of the Americanized German research university is not synonymous with land-grant colleges, but some land-grant colleges, especially those in the eastern United States, became premier models of the German model (Sorber, 2018).…”

“…The reality was that, despite the romanticized tale that land-grant colleges were agricultural and mechanical schools from the outset, these colleges had no other curriculum to base theirs on than the liberal arts. The politics were intense but brief; the initial agricultural societies' influence was rather modest beyond determining whether a college would associate with an existing college or not (Nelson, 2013;Sorber, 2013b;Sorber & Geiger, 2014). Very few farmers or laborers knew anything of the land-grants.…”