OSU’S land-grant mission has evolved
One hundred and 50 years ago this year, legislation paved the way for a new agricultural college on a patch of Franklin County farmland.
The Cannon Act created the Ohio
Agricultural and Mechanical College to receive funds made available through the Morrill Act, signed by President Abraham Lincoln eight years earlier.
The college was one of dozens of land-grant institutions that received funds from the sale of federal land and were meant to serve the industrial class with education in agriculture, mechanical arts and military tactics.
The institution we know today as Ohio State University has come a long way since just seven faculty members and 24 students enrolled on the first day.
In a century and a half, that once-fledgling agricultural college has grown to be one of the largest universities in the country, with more than 61,000 students at its main Columbus campus, nearly 50,000 faculty members and 500,000 living alumni all over the globe.
Has its original land-grant mission changed, too?
As Ohio State celebrates 150 years in education this year, The Dispatch is marking the university’s milestone with a series of stories that highlight its history and community over the years.
The land-grant mission is as much a part of Ohio State today as ever, said Columbus lawyer and longtime Ohio State trustee Alex Shumate.
“The mission has remained consistent, and that is that we will be a distinctive university focused on teaching, research and service,” said Shumate, who served for three terms on Ohio State’s board of trustees, his most recent ending earlier this year. “And that's the bedrock of the landgrant mission.”
The land grant is a “big idea,” said Nathan Sorber, an associate professor at the Center for the Future of Landgrant Education at West Virginia University in Morgantown.
“Different universities, university leaders ... have embraced different aspects to bring meaning to that legacy of the land-grant idea in the contemporary period,” he said.
While the curriculum at land-grant institutions was to include agriculture, military and mechanical arts (what we today consider as engineering), the Morrill Act stipulated that institutions were not to exclude classical or scientific subject matter.
They were not to be higher education institutions of a lower grade, Sorber said, but were meant to bring higher education into emerging fields with important state and national purposes.
And by focusing on the industrial class, the land-grant institutions created through the Morrill Act were “meant to open the door to the American dream to people who were from very modest means,” said Ohio State professor Stephen Gavazzi, who has studied and written about the future of land-grant universities.
But that access piece is one that land-grant schools like Ohio State have been challenged by, Gavazzi said.
“One of the things that all land grants have struggled with is how to remain accessible to the working classes while still pursuing excellence,” he said.
Gavazzi believes universities’ pursuit of national rankings, which first began to take hold in the mid-1980s, have led them to lose touch with their original land-grant missions. It was about that time that Ohio State began to shift away from open enrollment by initiating a selective admissions policy.
“As we become more selective, what happened was because part of the selectivity has to do with the incoming standardized test scores of the incoming freshmen, we began to drift from our land-grant mission,” he said.
Shumate disagrees, saying Ohio State has increased its diversity and has been able to serve students from more backgrounds through its selective admissions, specifically involving minority and first-generation students.
“The truth is that (before) selective admissions, there were so many applicants that the classes were closed in a couple weeks,” said Shumate, who first joined the board after the admissions decision was made in the 1990s. “And so it was, in a real sense, limiting access.”
Shumate also pointed to paths to Ohio State through other institutions and its regional campuses as an integral part of the land-grant mission.
“We have articulation agreements with Columbus State (Community College) and (local) universities, and through our regional campus system, we're able to — true to the land-grant mission — provide access,” he said. “So we strive as a university to always be relevant and always ask ourselves, ’Are we having a positive impact on our state, on our nation, and in our world?’”
Gavazzi also acknowledged the importance of Ohio State’s regional campuses in its access mission.
“We have shifted our land-grant mission of serving the working class to our regional campuses,” he said. “One out of every two incoming freshmen on the regional campuses is Pell Granteligible. That’s the working class.”
Still, he worries Ohio State is serving just a small sliver of the students in the state.
“What I think that we’re still lacking in is a real critical focus back to how is it that we serve those students who most need to get into Ohio State,” Gavazzi said.
The evolution of funding for public higher education also has necessitated change in the way land-grant schools like Ohio State operate, and, in turn, has impacted the mission of being accessible and affordable to many, Sorber said.
State funding for higher education in Ohio and across the country has decreased over the years, leaving public universities more dependent on tuition and attracting individual students.
“As the states have gotten in some places out of the business of funding higher education, it’s not surprising that land-grant institutions and others have focused their attention more greatly on ‘consumers’ or on individual students,” Sorber said.
As Ohio State continues work in the original land-grant focus of agriculture and through its 88 county extension offices, it also is tackling pressing issues for the state through its research and medical center work, Shumate said.
Some land-grant universities have made their access mission front and center, while others may be more selective with higher price points, emphasizing their research and realworld problem-solving, Sorber said. He puts Ohio State in the “quintessential” category of trying to embrace all of those things.
“Ohio State is a massive land-grant research university,” Sorber said, “And from that, Ohio State is able to touch a lot of lives throughout the state of Ohio.”
Shumate said it was a natural expansion of the land-grant approach.
“The way we're using our medical center now and reaching out to different parts of the state is really a modern approach to land grant, and (an) interdisciplinary nature of our university. We want to create these centers of excellence,” he said.
Shumate also pointed to Ohio State’s work with the Smart Cities program, efforts in combating the state opioid crisis and measures to address food security.
“We're challenging all of our departments and our colleges to constantly figure out creative ways to disseminate knowledge,” Shumate said. “Because at the end of the day, that's what it's all about.” jsmola@dispatch.com @jennsmola
Five months ago, Ohio State was preparing for a celebration. An anniversary open house weekend — the crowning jewel of the university’s sesquicentennial celebration — was to be held March 21. Students, faculty, alumni and community members were invited to join in behind-thescenes tours of research collections, special art exhibits and performances and more throughout campus.
And then, like so many other events planned for late March and beyond, the celebration was canceled as the coronavirus pandemic shut down universities, stores and restaurants across the state.
The pandemic has meant Ohio State’s 150th anniversary year has not panned out as expected. And it’s not the first time the university has marked a milestone anniversary during turbulent times.
Ohio State also shut down for a period in 1970, as it marked its centennial. The two-week closure during the spring of dissent was “considered a coolingoff period for everybody to take a step back,” said university archivist Tamar Chute. At the time, it was the longest period the university had been closed off to students and staff members.
Crowds had demonstrated throughout much of that spring over the Vietnam War and issues of race and gender equality. The protests had been growing heated during those weeks, and then four Kent State University students were killed when the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of demonstrators there May 4.
Ohio State shut down from May 7 to May 19 with the hopes of avoiding such a violent clash in Columbus.
The protests that year led to lasting changes at the university, including the creation of what was then the Office of Minority Affairs.
As the board of trustees approved that office and considered other student demands in late May 1970, the assistant managing editor of The Lantern student newspaper suggested that tumultuous year could be one of rebirth.
“It has been said that the events of the past month have ruined Ohio State's Centennial year,” wrote Louis M. Heldman on May 25, 1970. “Let us hope instead that these events make this 100th year a year of rebirth, of rededication to the ideals that have made this University great and a year marking the death of those old concepts of running a University that have held Ohio State back.”
So many of the anniversary events still went forward during that calendar year, Chute said. The only celebration to be canceled was May Week, a university tradition that often included a parade, a May Week supper on the Oval, the crowning of a “May Queen” and other activities.
Some of Ohio State’s 150th anniversary events and exhibits this year were still able to go forward, either in person before the pandemic struck or virtually. Among them were a free online course about the university’s history and a special sesquicentennial exhibit at Thompson Library.
But because of limits on gatherings and the continued uncertainty of the coronavirus, Ohio State hasn’t made any plans to reschedule its big anniversary open house.
“From one day to the next you don’t know what’s happening, I guess that probably was the same then,” Chute said of this year’s anniversary and the centennial in 1970. “That uncertainty is similar, but the issues are so different.” jsmola@dispatch.com @jennsmola