Amos Brown and the educational meaning of the American Agricultural College Act

Introduction The passage of the Agricultural College Act in 1862 is widely regarded as the watershed from which the modern American public university emerged. The direct, albeit not immediate, eŒect of the Agricultural College Act was the creation of American `land grant’ colleges. The land grant colleges were a practical means of broadening access to higher education, in terms of both geography and participation. In the years that followed the passage of the Agricultural College Act, from the late 1860s to the beginning of the twentieth century, new universities were founded, existing colleges were revamped and reorganized, and the liberal arts or `classical’ college transformed. All these changes relied to a signi®cant degree on the model of the land grant college. In the half-century prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War, various attempts had been made to reform the American college, which itself was for the most part an adaptation of the English model of Renaissance collegiate education. Although there were many reformers, successful reforms were few in number and modest in terms of practical eŒect. Some of the most signi®cant reforms led in the direction of the German university, which was of considerable interest to the founders of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Michigan, both of which predated the Agricultural Act but in the end did not de®ne it. Had the spirit and substance of reform been incremental, progressive and in a consistent direction, the land grant college might then and now have been regarded conventionally as an evolutionary idea whose time had come. In fact, many historians of American higher education take the Whiggish view that the emergence of the modern American university was essentially a matter of progressive evolution. The history of the land grant university, however, is neither linear nor predetermined. A number of recent studies demonstrate that the movement towards the land grant university proceeded in ®ts and starts, none of which was entirely successful, some of which were failures, and all of which were problematic in one way or another. Thus when the Agricultural College Act was introduced, ®rst in 1857 and later in 1862, there was no broad consensus about the direction in which American higher education should move. In fact, the Agricultural College Act said more about how such a