Land-grant Universities Research Articles

The Impact of COVID-19 on Pre-Veterinary Opportunities and Recommendations for DVM Admissions.

During the summer of 2020, a survey-based study was conducted at North Carolina State University, a land-grant university, to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on pre-veterinary students' ability to gain experience hours for Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) admissions. Of the 286 respondents (47% of the respondent pool), 92% reported losing at least one animal, veterinary, research, extracurricular, or work opportunity due to COVID-19, and 59% were not able to find a replacement. Of the lost experiences, 74 (20.8%) were for academic credit, resulting in 131 total academic credit hours lost, while only 12 credit hours were gained via alternative experiences. Of respondents, 30% (29.7%) identified as applicants of the 2020-2021 Veterinary Medical College Application Service (VMCAS) cycle. More than half (52.6%) of the sample identified being concerned about the strength of their VMCAS experiences due to these lost opportunities. Many respondents reported considering delaying application submissions by taking a gap year (17.5%) or having had their intended graduation timeline affected (14.8%). Since the majority of veterinary colleges utilize a holistic review process, this study provides a basis for understanding the effects of COVID-19 on the duration, depth, and diversity of experiences gained by future DVM applicants. This article also provides recommendations for DVM admissions adaptations based on the outcomes of the data.

“My Entire World Stopped”: College Students’ Psychosocial and Academic Frustrations during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted normalcy for college attending young adults which resulted in a loss of the campus environment and classroom setting. This change in setting may interfere with a student’s personal and academic wellbeing. This study used an online survey to evaluate college students’ academic and psychosocial frustrations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected from March–April 2020 at a land-grant university in the Appalachian region. Data were available from 2643 undergraduate and graduate students. There was a 65.8% and 15.7% increase in the number of students who reported their learning and health as fair, poor, or very poor after the COVID-19 pandemic, respectively. Qualitative responses were coded and 8 themes and 24 subthemes emerged. College students expressed frustrations regarding technology, classwork, research, family, social, emotional, behavioral, and financial aspects of life. These results can be used by higher education administration, faculty, and staff when planning for online courses. Ensuring that student frustrations and barriers to success are recognized and considered may help prevent students departing from higher education during this time.

ANEW Project to Develop and Support Rural Primary Practice

South Dakota is one of the nation’s most rural and frontier states and has the highest proportion of rural dwellers in the Midwest. Many of the state’s counties suffer from provider shortages, with nurse practitioners increasingly being called upon to fill the role of the primary care provider in clinics and critical access hospitals. However, family nurse practitioner (FNP) education programs are not required to provide the training and skills necessary to meet the unique challenges of rural practice.
 An Upper Midwest land grant university prepares both masters and doctoral FNP students to fill primary care provider needs in South Dakota and the surrounding region. The purpose and scope of this two-year Advanced Nursing Education Workforce (ANEW) project was to enhance an existing academic/practice partnership to prepare primary care advanced practice registered nursing (APRN) students for practice in rural and/or underserved settings in the state and region. The ANEW project provided FNP students with a longitudinal primary care clinical traineeship experience in rural clinical settings.
 Trainees benefited from traineeship funds, learning advanced procedures and skill concepts through attendance at a series of educational workshops, and job placement efforts postgraduation. The ANEW project also provided for a comprehensive preceptor development collaborative designed to enhance competence and confidence for independent rural practice and facilitate job placement in rural communities after graduation.
 This project strengthened the quality of FNP education through an academic/practice partnership which resulted in a symbiotic, synergistic relationship to address rural work force supply and the identification of the knowledge and skills needed for current and future rural healthcare providers.
 Keywords: family nurse practitioner, education, preceptor, academic, practice partnership, rural primary healthcare, healthcare provider shortage
 DOI: https://doi.org/10.14574/ojrnhc.v21i1.649

Supporting Postsecondary Faculty Transition to Rapid Online Teaching & Learning

North Carolina postsecondary faculty, similar to faculty around the world, who prepared their spring 2020 semester courses for face-to-face delivery, were required to quickly transition to Rapid Online Teaching and Learning (ROTL). This transition was expected within a short time frame, often one to two weeks, and for many faculty members, both time and resources to incorporate design practices found in high-quality online courses were limited. Faculty members demonstrated great determination and grit as they shifted to remote teaching and learning with a focus on the student success, even while feeling overwhelmed and disrupted themselves. Researchers examined two faculty-support programs designed to assist with the shift to online teaching during the COVID-19 crisis: one at a research-intensive, land-grant university and another for faculty at 58 community colleges, some of whom are enrolled in a CPED Ed.D. program. Lessons learned and thoughts on planning for future semesters are examined

Four master teachers who fostered American turn-of-the-(20TH)-century mycology and plant pathology

The Morrill Act of 1862 afforded the US states the opportunity to found state colleges with agriculture as part of their mission—the so-called "land-grant colleges." The Hatch Act of 1887 gave the same opportunity for agricultural experiment stations as functions of the land-grant colleges, and the "third Morrill Act" (the Smith-Lever Act) of 1914 added an extension dimension to the experiment stations. Overall, the end of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th was a time for growing appreciation for, and growth of institutional education in the natural sciences, especially botany and its specialties, mycology, and phytopathology. This paper outlines a particular genealogy of mycologists and plant pathologists representative of this era. Professor Albert Nelson Prentiss, first of Michigan State then of Cornell, Professor William Russel Dudley of Cornell and Stanford, Professor Mason Blanchard Thomas of Wabash College, and Professor Herbert Hice Whetzel of Cornell Plant Pathology were major players in the scenario. The supporting cast, the students selected, trained, and guided by these men, was legion, a few of whom are briefly traced here.

Play, Design, Create, Fail, Teach, and Repeat: A Design Case Of Designing a Maker Education Course for Preservice Teachers

This design case shows a course designed for teaching preservice teachers about how to design literacy-infused STEAM learning experiences that involve both making and the use of educational technology at a large Midwestern land-grant university in the U.S. This course emphasizes the high-tech making activities in PK-12 formal education that offers students richer, more engaging, and potentially more meaningful learning experiences. The course expects to equip the preservice teachers with the understanding and skills they need to be ready to transform existing curricula in PK-12 education, incorporate curricula that cultivate creativity, design thinking, and problem-solving, and provide students authentic instructions and the opportunities to be the creators and owners of their learning. The current design case highlights design decisions during the design process.

Fruit Yield and Physicochemical Quality Evaluation of Hybrid and Grafted Field-Grown Muskmelon in Pennsylvania

Selecting vegetable cultivars suitable to local environmental conditions and with quality traits desired by the evolving market and consumer needs is an important production decision farmers face annually. As seed companies continue to expand their offerings of new cultivars and rootstocks, selecting the best cultivar and/or scion/rootstock combination can be challenging for farmers. Land-grant universities, through their integrated research and extension programs, can provide an unbiased, science-based evaluation of the available cultivar and rootstock options to assist farmers in making this important selection. A two-year study was conducted to evaluate 20 hybrid cultivars and two grafted entries of muskmelons at three locations in Pennsylvania in 2018 and 2019 to provide farmers with science-based recommendations focused on fruit yield and physicochemical quality characteristics. Most cultivars did not differ in fruit yields from the standard “Aphrodite”. “Sugar Cube” produced more, smaller sized melons than “Aphrodite”. However, the combination of the soluble solids concentration, flesh pH, and titratable acidity values was not as favorable, indicating that consumer preference may be lower for “Sugar Cube” than for other cultivars. Yield from grafted entries was not different from the non-grafted “Aphrodite”; although, biotic and abiotic stressors favoring the use of grafting were not present throughout the study. Physicochemical evaluation of the combination of “Aphrodite” scion and “Flexifort” rootstock was more favorable than “Aphrodite/RS841” and non-grafted “Aphrodite”. This combination may be desirable even in the absence of yield stressors.

Seeds of equity: cultivating critical food literacy in the land-grant undergraduate classroom

ABSTRACT This pedagogical piece reports on the successes and challenges of developing and teaching an undergraduate “critical food literacy„ course in a land-grant university’s college of agriculture. The United States agricultural industry is built upon a foundation of stolen land and stolen labor, and depends to this day on the labor of marginalized populations. Despite these hard truths about who grows our food, colleges of agriculture remain overwhelmingly white demographically, culturally, and epistemologically. Though scholars have called for greater incorporation of social justice themes in college-level agriculture courses, there is little research to date on the effectiveness of various suggested teaching methods. To address this gap and contribute to the necessary work of diversifying curricula across colleges of agriculture, we conducted a qualitative assessment of the course “Seeds of equity: Exploring race, class, and gender in our food system„ while simultaneously developing and teaching it. We use our personal experiences and research findings to argue that critical food literacy is an effective framework for teaching students at a large, Midwestern land-grant university about race, class, and gender in the food system. We also offer concrete suggestions of course materials, assignments, and teaching methods that can be utilized in myriad food studies and agricultural education classroom contexts.

Visual Ethnographic Evaluation of Construction Programs at Public Universities: Who is Valued in Construction Education?

The US construction management profession has failed to recruit and retain women and underrepresented racial-ethnic minorities (URMs) in the workforce, despite growing industry demand for college-educated graduates due to skilled-labor shortages. Women and URM students in four-year construction education programs are more likely to change majors or drop out when they are unable to develop a sense of belonging in their degree program, exacerbating the lack of diversity and labor shortages in the construction industry. Students’ physical learning environment on campus can convey nonverbal messages regarding belonging, and can therefore influence student retention and persistence. This study systematically evaluated 140 physical artifacts (art, signs, photographs, etc.) on display in three construction education programs at US land-grant universities. Utilizing an existing visual anthropological taxonomy designed to interpret equity messages communicated by artifacts, researchers explored nonverbal messages relating to the question of who is valued and who belongs’ in construction education. White men were regularly named and represented in positions of power and leadership in the evaluated artifacts. In contrast, women and URMs were typically underrepresented and unnamed, with people of color overly portrayed in construction manual labor roles. Results suggest that construction education programs can foster more inclusive student learning environments by diversifying and updating physical artifacts on display within department public spaces and classrooms.

A Qualitative Approach to Understanding Grain Bin Entry Decisions by Youth

ABSTRACT Youths – defined as children under the age of 18 – are frequently involved in agricultural work. Parental assignment, briefing, and supervision of hazardous farm tasks have an influence on youth safety, yet many youths are injured or killed performing these tasks. This research utilized a qualitative approach to analyze why youths choose to make hazardous decisions regarding grain bin entry and factors that played a role in youths’ decisions. Because we know that youth are working on the farm, the study’s objective was to examine the parent-youth relationship to determine the conditions under which youth would follow or refuse their parents’ orders. Ten students who attended a Midwestern land-grant institution were interviewed. Interviewees had experience working inside grain bins, were highly involved in their family farming operations while under 18 years old, and worked under frequent parental supervision. Interviewees shared conditions where they followed their parents’ orders even when they knew the task was unsafe. Moreover, participants indicated when they would refuse orders from parents. Findings showed that the primary source of agricultural safety knowledge came from the interviewees’ parents. Interviewees did not necessarily demonstrate a “blind trust” in their parents, as they were not willing to follow all orders they were asked to complete. However, all interviewees indicated that their parents would not ask them to do anything unsafe. Many barriers to farm safety were emphasized by the interviewees, which may contribute to youths choosing to make hazardous decisions regarding grain bin entry under some conditions. The research implications are emphasized relative to youth safety outcomes on family farms.

Reckoning with the Original Sin of Land-Grant Universities: Remaining Land-Grant Fierce While Insisting on Contrition and Repentance

Reckoning with the Original Sin of Land-Grant Universities:Remaining Land-Grant Fierce While Insisting on Contrition and Repentance Stephen M. Gavazzi (bio) when e. gordon gee and i wrote Land-Grant Universities for the Future: Higher Education for the Public Good (2018), we were determined to explore the strengths and weaknesses of land-grant universities while simultaneously examining the changing threats they faced as twenty-first-century institutions of higher learning. Ultimately, we asserted that leaders and supporters should become more "land-grant fierce" in their orientation. We meant to underscore the notion that the tripartite mission of the land-grant universities—teaching, research, and service—was a particularly noble undertaking to be embraced passionately because the aim was to directly meet the needs of those communities they were designed to serve. The subsequent book that David Staley and I coedited—Fulfilling the 21st Century Land-Grant Mission: Essays in Honor of The Ohio State University's Sesquicentennial Commemoration (2020)—followed a similar script. We instructed authors from across our university—representing fields as various as agriculture, dance, English, engineering, family science, geography, medicine, social work, and veterinary science—to celebrate the unique ways Ohio State was "land-grant fierce." The focus once again was directed toward the honorableness of the enterprise itself; that is, a storyline underscored how a land-grant university was following its virtuous mission of meeting community challenges and solving society's problems. When the Land-Grab Universities (LGU) report (Lee and Ahtone 2020) was issued a few months after I had submitted the final edited version of the essays to be published in Fulfilling the 21st Century Land-Grant Mission, the proverbial scales fell from my eyes. Everything I knew about the 1862 Morrill Act, the congressional action that provided parcels of land to states that could be used or sold off to build an institution of higher learning, was turned upside down. As every reader of the Land-Grab Universities report now knows, the noble and virtuous land-grant mission was founded on distortions, violence, and the ongoing suffering of dispossessed people. In short, the bill, which was designed to create public universities in each [End Page 157] state of the Union and was sponsored by Vermont senator Justin Morrill and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, gave away territories taken from Native American tribes typically by brute force or lopsided treaties. Judging by the seemingly endless social media conversations occurring about the Land-Grab Universities report, this information was news to a great many people, not just to me. I ended up taking the report both personally and seriously, however. As a longtime employee of a land-grant university—and as someone who received bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from two additional land-grant universities—I felt compelled to begin speaking out about what I termed the "Original Sin" of our nation's first public universities. In one of the first articles I composed as a Forbes contributor (Gavazzi 2020), I stated that acknowledgment of the disreputable background of the Morrill Act had become an important first step for the faculty, staff, students, and alumni of land-grant universities. However, I made the assertion that simple recognition was never going to be enough. The appropriate response from these institutions of higher learning would require both contrition and reparation. That is, it would be necessary for the leaders of the land-grant universities to find ways to meaningfully own the circumstances of their founding, acknowledge the debt, and provide some reasonable form of compensation. I also wrote that there were some significant parallels in terms of the national dialogue regarding slavery—often described as America's "Original Sin"—as there were similar calls for contrition and reparations. However, whereas the incredible moral failing of Article 1 of the original United States Constitution is self-evident in terms of its support of slavery, it is less obvious exactly who should be on the receiving end of a genuine apology, let alone who should receive reparations. Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone (2020) make it abundantly clear that land-grant universities do not suffer from this same problem. The amount and location of...

The Future Is in the Past: How Land-Grab Universities Can Shape the Future of Higher Education

The Future Is in the Past:How Land-Grab Universities Can Shape the Future of Higher Education Theresa Stewart-Ambo (bio) indigenous people and scholars have long contested the history of U.S. colleges and universities. The late educational historian Irvin Lee "Bobby" Wright was among the first to challenge the idyllic narrative of colonial colleges that profited from and aimed to assimilate Indigenous youth.1 In the last decade, the idyllic narrative has been critiqued by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars who have laid bare the violently dispossessive origins of higher education in the U.S. settler-colonial state, particularly land-grant universities. The Land-Grab Universities (LGU) project rejects the myth of land-grant universities by tracing the distribution of approximately 10.7 million acres under the 1862 Morrill Act—land taken from nearly 250 Native nations through more than 160 violence-backed land cessions. Historian Robert Lee and journalist Tristan Ahtone also document how land-grant universities have (in the past and present) monetarily profited from the sale of land vouchers, known as "scrip," and mineral rights. The report, public database, and digital project are compelling; what I find to be even more insightful is where LGU points us.2 As a doctoral student in higher education at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 2016, I began searching for information on how Tovaangar (Tongva territory now known as the Los Angeles Basin) came to be the present-day campus. The truth, as described by Lee and Ahtone, was "hiding in plain sight."3 In California, "thirty-two land-grant universities got a share of California Indian land, raising approximately $3.6 million from over 1.7 million acres."4 As a Tongva/Luiseño woman, an alumnus of UCLA, and assistant professor of education at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), I reflect on California, the UC system, and UCLA to draw additional insights from Lee and Ahtone's research. I will close by offering my perspective on how the LGU project can inform the present and future of higher education, providing implications for institutions and asking the question: How can the past shape the future? [End Page 162] Land-Grant Universities in California LGU is framed by the dispossession of California's Indigenous population, so it feels fitting to orient readers with additional history of the state.5 Much like that of the rest of the United States, the history of California is complicated. The state has always been well known for its diverse ecology and climate, as well as being home to the most politically, socially, and culturally diverse Indigenous population in the nation. The Indigenous people of California endured settler colonialism by the Spanish, Mexican, Russian (in the north), and U.S. empires. Beginning in 1769 with the introduction of the Spanish mission system, Indigenous people of the state resisted the introduction of foreign diseases, forced labor, state and federally sanctioned genocide, and forced removal and relocation. Conspiring to eliminate the Indigenous population, settlers systematically and strategically murdered and removed hundreds of thousands of people to gain control of the state's resource-rich and ecologically desirable territory.6 After California became a state in 1850, the state government enacted discriminatory policies that had devastating consequences for California Indians. Implemented that year, the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians criminalized the very existence of Indigenous people and created a system of indentured servitude rooted in surveillance, control, and confinement. Under these circumstances the federal government dispensed Indian agents to California to negotiate treaties. Between 1851 and 1852, eighteen treaties were signed with 118 tribes, with signatories "agreeing" to cede their lands to the United States in exchange for reservation lands and other benefits. Nineteen reservations were designated, totaling 7.488 million acres, which represented only 7.5 percent of California. Understanding the value of the land, the U.S. Senate rejected all of the treaties in a secret session; meanwhile, many California Indians were moved to reservations. In 1860, following the treaty period but preceding the Morrill Act, the U.S. Congress endorsed and financed an appropriations bill for $400,000 called the Act for the Payment of Expenses...

Looking Forward from Land-Grab Universities

Looking Forward from Land-Grab Universities Tristan Ahtone (bio) and Robert Lee (bio) when the nais journal editors contacted us about hosting an intervention on the Land-Grab Universities (LGU) project, we were surprised and excited. We went to press as the COVID-19 pandemic exploded and half-joked that March 2020 may have been the worst month of the century in which to publish. Partners who initially expressed interest in copublishing and investigating dropped out. Universities sent students home and pushed our findings into the background. Then police in Minneapolis killed George Floyd, sparking mass protests against racist law enforcement practices that pose urgent threats to BIPOC across the United States. In the middle of a crisis, who would have the time to read about the ties between Indigenous dispossession and land-grant universities, let alone engage with our findings? Judging by the essays here, we had less to worry about than we thought. These responses offer the kinds of critical reactions we hoped for. We are humbled that NAIS solicited them and thankful to the authors for writing them. As an anthology—the first of its kind on the debts universities owe to Indigenous nations—the essays can be read to orient the future study of land-grant universities. That's how we've discussed them, prompted by questions from the editors. We're grateful for the opportunity to present the following conversation in response. Was there any particular essay or commentary that surprised you? Any that you would like to specifically respond to? lee: The sheer diversity of approaches jumped out to me, with essays from public policy, American studies, digital humanities, literature, history, education, economics, geography. Still, points of convergence appear that might be useful for outlining a land-grant university research agenda. One of those points concerned the relationship between studies of universities' ties to Indigenous land versus enslaved labor. Nearly half the essays mention the connection. We did the same in our article, but it looks like the time has come to start asking what is distinctive, and distinctively challenging, about unpacking histories of capital accumulation from stolen Indigenous land. We can see some of the contours here. Stephen Gavazzi reminds us that universities' profits from Indigenous land can be tracked with greater [End Page 176] precision than is often possible with those from the slave trade. We relied on that precision in the LGU project, but as several other essays point out, that condition doesn't always hold. Using IPEDS data on higher education, Donna Feir and Maggie Jones provide evidence of how land-grant universities have underserved AIAN populations but note that getting more granular is not possible. Randall Akee diagnoses similar limitations on measuring the impact of dispossession, while Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy and Amanda R. Tachine talk about the reduction of Indigenous experiences to an asterisk as a form of erasure. ahtone: Caitlin Harvey's essay really surprised me. She provides an international look at how this same process worked elsewhere, and I just had no idea. In retrospect, that makes sense, since our project revealed truths that seem obvious but well hidden. That Harvey was able to pull this together and provide an international lens gave me pause to think about how this project could be done globally as an even bigger look at the ways in which settler colonialism and education are hopelessly intertwined. It's the same brand, just different flavors in other parts of the world. lee: Harvey does with the British Empire what others do for the United States: push the story beyond the Morrill Act of 1862. Theresa Stewart-Ambo tells us about UCLA. Alyssa Mt. Pleasant and Stephen Kantrowitz dive into SUNY-Buffalo and the University of Wisconsin. Meredith McCoy, Roopika Risam, and Jennifer Guiliano point us toward Ohio universities. Against these essays and in light of what we don't know about non-Anglo contexts, Harvey's table showing a total of 15.4 million acres looks like a starting point to ask just how much Indigenous land around the globe has aggrandized universities. Any attempt to answer that question will make the scope of the LGU project look small. What potential...

The Future of Land-Grab Universities

The Future of Land-Grab Universities Meredith McCoy (bio), Roopika Risam (bio), and Jennifer Guiliano (bio) the land-grab universities (lgu) project compellingly conveys how nearly eleven million acres of land were stolen from almost 250 tribes, bands, and communities to establish land-grant universities.1 In their work identifying nearly all tracts covered under the Morrill Land Grant Acts, the LGU team connected Indigenous nations with their tracts and calculated the financial benefits land-grant institutions reaped from sales of these lands. Placing the Morrill Act into the context of widespread fraudulent and coercive land-seizure practices in the mid- to late 1800s, LGU successfully illustrates how the existence of contemporary land-grant universities is predicated on extractive legal practices backed by threats of government violence. Students, faculty, and staff at land-grants occupy the shadows of these violent, genocidal processes that forcibly expropriated lands from Indigenous peoples and communities. A critical piece of investigative journalism, LGU raises awareness of how land-grant universities not only exist upon Indigenous lands but also have been built with Indigenous lands.2 Through interactive visualizations that allow users to search by state, institution, and tribal community, readers learn how the Morrill Act provided a financial foundation for contemporary land-grant universities. Supported by an extensive bibliography and links to media coverage of the project, the visualizations provide information on endowments, enrollment (including Indigenous student enrollment), and profits generated from the Morrill Acts. LGU depicts tracts expropriated, grantees, and the total financial gains generated through those lands. Users learn, for example, about the impact of the 1851 Dakota cession, which reassigned nearly 830,000 acres to endow thirty-five different universities, linking one out of every 13 acres redistributed under Morrill to the United States' dispossession of Dakota people across Mní Sota Makoče. The striking numbers revealed in LGU's financial analysis make this project a critical intervention into conversations about land dispossession and higher education. Future projects could extend this work even further: U.S. Department of Commerce economist William Larson estimated in 2015 that the 1.89 billion acres of land that make up the United States of America were worth $23 trillion. Splitting the United States into census [End Page 169] tracts, parcels, and counties, Larson identified "land" price and value estimates that included "ecosystems (e.g. root systems such as alfalfa), basic siting improvements (e.g. fencing, irrigation, and land clearing), and stocks of natural resources that convey with the land (e.g. timber, water, hunting, and fishing rights)."3 LGU accounts for land price for all institutions, while some valuations included mineral rights and surface rights.4 Yet land valuation is more complex, as institutions' longitudinal financial benefits from land accrue over time. For example, institutions cleared their lands, selling off timber or using the resources to build. The estimated value of those resources along with others like hunting rights, mineral rights, and access to water increases calculations of institutions' financial gains, as would calculations of tax benefits and other financial incentives. This more complex understanding of land valuation further illuminates the ways settler colonialism is extractive—not simply predicated on landownership and the sale of land but on its utility for continually generating profit over time. We might push those wishing to build on LGU's argument to take a more expansive view of the value of land, one that would consider relations between humans and more-than-human relatives to understand land's importance. LGU's reliance on private property values alone, without drawing attention to the importance of Indigenous relationships with land, risks confirming settler logics of capitalist valuation that undergird the imagined right of colonization on terra nullius. Depicting value and land impact only in terms of capital reinforces settler notions of land as an extractable commodity. Instead, an approach that engages nonquantitative analyses of the impact of Morrill Act transfers could help users revise their understanding of land as a capitalist deliverable. What if, for example, LGU offered users a chance to think through a different relationship to land that engages with Indigenous ways of knowing that rely on active maintenance of relationship to the land through responsible stewardship? This would raise...

The Wealth of Knowledge: Land-Grab Universities in a British Imperial and Global Context

The Wealth of Knowledge:Land-Grab Universities in a British Imperial and Global Context Caitlin P. A. Harvey (bio) the colonial legacy of the American land-grant university traced by the Land-Grab Universities (LGU) project, of public universities "built not just on Indigenous land, but with Indigenous land," reveals a far-reaching pattern of institutional development that relied on the leasing and selling of enormous tracts of expropriated Indigenous lands to raise universities' endowment capital.1 The mechanism effecting this tremendous land redistribution was the Morrill Act (1862). Yet while it was the largest, the Morrill Act was not the only legislative grant of Indigenous land made to fund higher education in the United States or among settler societies worldwide. Contextualizing the LGU findings within the larger history of land-grant universities in British settlement societies makes clear that the American land-grant phenomenon was just one episode in the expanding territoriality of settler-colonial universities. Particularly in Canada and New Zealand but also in Australia and South Africa, fledgling public universities received substantial blocks of unceded Indigenous territory as financing from their governments. The development of America's educational institutions, therefore, did not unfold in isolation from the trends established in other Anglo-dominant settler societies. When we consider the land-grant university in British imperial and global perspective, the full territoriality of land-grant universities comprises over 15 million acres spread over three continents (table 1). Settlers' provincial and federal governments sponsored land-grant institutions with the aim of applying scientific methods to agriculture, fostering technological innovation, and creating an internationally competitive yet civic-minded workforce.2 In New Zealand (Aotearoa) in 1869, for instance, the Province of Otago's legislators issued deeds of 100,000 acres for the University of Otago, followed by another 100,000 acres on the South Island (Te Waipounamu) in the 1870s.3 The Ngāi Tahu disputed this reallocation. But with the New Zealand Wars ongoing and swayed by the complaints of Otago University's largest land lessee, Robert Campbell, the colonial state evicted the Māori landholders.4 [End Page 97] Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. Aggregate Totals of University Land by Grant and Location In England, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge had long relied on the rental income generated by landholding. Even today, the Oxbridge colleges "are among the largest institutional landowners" in land-scarce England.5 Settler societies carried on this European custom on a larger and more devastating scale. Particularly where capital was lacking from benefactions, fees, or government subsidies, the resort to land-granting was continuous. As early as 1619, the British government assigned 10,000 acres to a "Henrico College" in Virginia. Warfare with the Powhatan Confederacy and chronic underpopulation ensured that this institution was short-lived.6 Reaching forward to the nineteenth century and prior to the Morrill Act, The Constitutional History of New York indicates that in 1846 the U.S. [End Page 98] government released to "Tennessee 1,300,000 acres of public land in that state for the endowment of a college."7 This land, nearly the size of Delaware, lay to the "south and west of the Congressional reservation line." Supposedly "vacant and unappropriated Lands" existed there after the violent removal of the Cherokee.8 In nearly the same moment, one of the earliest educational land grants in British North America went to King's College, a precursor to the University of Toronto, in 1828. An Anglican bishop, John Strachan, secured 225,944 acres of valuable Crown Reserves for the new college.9 It is likely that much of this property once supported the Mississaugas of New Credit (Mississauga Ojibwa). Under the strain of recurring Indigenous-settler skirmishes, the Mississaugas ceded 250,808 acres of their land—covering most of what is now the city of Toronto and region of York—first to the British Crown in 1787 and then to the Upper Canadian government in 1805. The Toronto Purchase, as these agreements became known, followed the influx of Loyalists into Upper Canada after the American Revolutionary War.10 Following Canadian Confederation in 1867, institutions of higher learning repeated Toronto's (and, by then, also...

"We Grow the Ivy": Cornell's Claim to Indigenous Dispossession

"We Grow the Ivy":Cornell's Claim to Indigenous Dispossession Judy Kertész (bio) and Angela A. Gonzales (bio) the state of new york incorporated Cornell University, its Ivy League land-grant institution, three years after the passage of the Morrill Act, also known as the Agricultural College Land Grant of 1862. The brainchild of Justin Smith Morrill, gentleman farmer and U.S. senator from Vermont, the Morrill Act was a response to the limited higher-education opportunities afforded to rural and working-class families.1 In 1889 Cornell University acknowledged its great debt when it named its first building Morrill Hall and prominently featured a portrait of Morrill in its library alongside that of the university's founder, Ezra Cornell. Morrill, much like Ezra Cornell, believed that "if the training and education of domestic animals wonderfully increases their value and title to esteem, obviously for man, having 'dominion over every living creature,' it must be of vastly higher importance."2 Their shared worldview encompassed the idea of man's mastery over the earth. Land as nature required the civilizing hand of the bucolic yeoman farmer if only so domesticated animals could safely graze, root, and roost, where mechanically minded savants and the educated scions of farmers could rule over land, hoe in hand.3 Critical to keep in mind is the long-enduring ideal of the yeoman farmer in the settler imagination. Through his engagement with agricultural development and his mastery of technology, the yeoman farmer justified the appropriation of land. Vital to the rhetoric and policies of American expansionism, the yeoman farmer transformed the American wilderness through husbandry and agriculture rather than violence. So the story goes. Myth merged with militarization so that in the midst of the U.S. Civil War, the federal government, as if ex nihilo, allocated 10.7 million acres of "public land" to individual states.4 States in turn were to sell their apportionment in order to fund universities that would teach "branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, including military tactics."5 While the last of these three areas of learning has yet to be mentioned on any land-grant institution's website, we should pay particular attention to the third category, intended to insure the United States' military reach and viability. [End Page 145] Overall, the premise of the land-grant institution is that it serves the public that funds it. Cornell states that its mission is to "discover, preserve and disseminate knowledge, to educate the next generation of global citizens, and to promote a culture of broad inquiry throughout and beyond the Cornell community."6 This is the unfettered byline, the self-referential origin story that the majority of land-grant institutions like Cornell promote when relating their particular institution's purpose. What gets lost in the morass of institutional myth-making is the history of the land-grant system's inception within the much larger context of war. As of 2003, 60 percent of public research institutions that comprised the National Association of State Universities were land-grant schools. One-third of the nation's research universities and forty-six of the original fifty land grants are classified as research universities, while thirty-one of the fifty are Research I institutions.7 Indeed, as some have argued, the establishment of the land-grant system and its subsequent expansion explains to a great degree the enhancement of the technological infrastructure of the United States. The nation's ascent as a global economic superpower in the twentieth century is a direct consequence of the establishment of land-grant institutions, the indispensable engine that drove the long-term rate of per capita GDP growth in the United States.8 Revisionist histories seek to disentangle myth from history while weighing ethically questionable consequences against the ambitions of transnational corporations and nation-states, as well as settler-centric narratives against Indigenous historical experience. For years, cross-disciplinary scholars within Indigenous studies have countered land-grant narratives of self with charges of land grabbing, or the "foreignization of space."9 By definition, land grabbing is the large-scale expropriation of land that occurs without the prior, willing, and informed consent...

"Unrefutable Responsibility": Mapping the Seeds of Settler Futurity and Seeding the Maps of Indigenous Futurity

"Unrefutable Responsibility":Mapping the Seeds of Settler Futurity and Seeding the Maps of Indigenous Futurity Marcel Brousseau (bio) Interpretation "The map," the Potawatomi cartographer Margaret Pearce has written, "presents the results but omits the process." The meaning of this maxim applies not only to the geologic events indexed by river signs and hachures but also to the "locations of the remnants or artifacts of cultural processes," which sometimes must be "gleaned from what is seen" in the cartographic frame.1 Gleaning is a good way to describe what Pearce, alongside Robert Lee, Tristan Ahtone (Kiowa), Kalen Goodluck (Diné/Mandan/Hidatsa/Tsimshian), Geoff McGhee, and Katherine Lanpher have done in Land-Grab Universities, the feature from the March 2020 issue of High Country News.2 By combing beneath the U.S. national map, they have found the "seed money for higher education in the United States" in the form of coerced Indigenous land cessions turned real-estate parcels turned university endowments.3 At the center of this project, Pearce's maps, made in "nonhierarchical" collaboration with the High Country News team—and made quite literally with the parcel polygon shapefiles painstakingly reconstructed by Lee from archival documentation—subvert the common sense of the map: they confront the results of an expropriated landscape by presenting the violent and obscurantist processes through which it was made.4 Pearce's maps make visible processual variations of replacement, or the ongoing project by which settler colonists eliminate Indigenous presence and establish settler sovereignty. As Eve Tuck (Unangaˆx) and Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández explain, methods of replacement include "homicide, but also state-sanctioned miscegenation, the issuing of individual land titles, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, reprogramming (via missions or boarding schools), and myriad forms of assimilation," all following what Patrick Wolfe calls the "logic of elimination," which asserts that settlers' need for territory necessitates the removal of Indigenous people.5 The removal and replacement of Indigenous people are guided by [End Page 112] settlers' desire to "supersede the conditions" of the colonial encounter and to attain what Lorenzo Veracini terms the "non-encounter," a disavowal of settler status whereby the settler "repress[es], co-opt[s], and extinguish[es] indigenous alterities, and productively manage[s] ethnic diversity" en route to replacing the Native as native.6 As Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández show, structures of replacement are normalized through educational curricula that "creat[e, as] a national subject," the "white subject, whose manifest destiny is to take the place of the savage."7 This process doubly implicates land-grant universities as sites that pedagogically "[maintain] symbolic logics through which to justify the theft and occupation of Indigenous land" while also materially partaking of the national replacement of Indigenous land as real estate.8 Land-Grab Universities (LGU) shows that the so-called democracy's colleges, the fifty-two land-grant universities, exemplified the logic of elimination by remediating Indigenous land into permanent endowments of money, thus deferring actual encounters with Indigenous people over thousands of acres of actual land.9 The Morrill Act's transmutation of Indigenous land into perpetual capital replaces the historic reality of Indigenous dispossession with the futuristic reality of settler possession in the form of a "fund [that] shall remain forever undiminished."10 Land-grant universities are thus instruments of what Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández call "settler futurity," in that they are a form of permanent preparation for settler dominance and territorial control.11 As with Pearce's definition of the map, land-grant universities present the results but omit the process. By mapping the Morrill Act's structures of replacement, Pearce also maps the procedures by which Native land becomes nonencounterable as Indigenous or land. In conversation, Pearce stated that her broad vision for LGU was to make maps that followed the narrative of the article while reflecting different types of mapping.12 There are five types of maps in the print and online versions of LGU (in addition to the Mapbox online interface designed by Geoff McGhee, which remediates some conventions of Pearce's maps). In juxtaposition with the localized account of Ishi (Yahi), which begins the article, the first map presents an orthographic "high...

Land-grant lessons for Anthropocene universities

Established amidst the bloodshed of the Civil War, land-grant universities, together with the associated agricultural experiment stations and cooperative extension services, have played a crucial role in democratizing scientific knowledge and addressing intertwined educational, environmental, economic, and democratic challenges within the USA. Indeed, they have arguably pioneered the idea of “usable science.” Today, the urgent challenges of the Anthropocene demand a more robust relationship between scientific research and on-the-ground action, strong networks sharing local lessons globally, and channels for injecting global, long-term perspectives into the noise of short-termism. The land-grant experience provides lessons for “Anthropocene universities” seeking to tackle these challenges, including the importance of (1) establishing or expanding university-based boundary organizations akin to cooperative extension, (2) incentivizing the integration of engagement into the university’s research, teaching, and service missions, (3) centering values of democracy, justice, equity, and inclusion in engagement, and (4) cooperating across institutions and sectors. Given the urgency of fully engaging academic institutions as players and connectors in the real-world challenges of addressing climate change and biodiversity loss, there is little time to waste.

Campuses, Colonialism, and Land Grabs before Morrill

Campuses, Colonialism, and Land Grabs before Morrill Alyssa MT. Pleasant (bio) and Stephen Kantrowitz (bio) readers of the articles and materials included in the Land-Grab Universities (LGU) project learn about the financial machinations and land expropriation at the heart of the Morrill Act's financing of land-grant universities across the United States. Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone's important investigative reporting illuminates a range of relationships and degrees of reliance on Indigenous dispossession at fifty-two educational institutions across the United States. Their work explores a critical moment of settler-colonial exploitation, adding another layer to the history of Indigenous peoples and formal schooling. Critically, this research facilitates readers' understanding of the foundational role Indigenous dispossession has played in the establishment, expansion, and maintenance of major educational institutions. LGU is both a powerful testament and a tool that can be utilized by those invested in transforming relationships between Indigenous peoples and higher-education institutions. This work should also serve as a springboard, prompting readers to investigate, question, and reflect on how every campus has shaped and been shaped by its relationship to the land and to Indigenous peoples. Until recently, campus processes of investigation, interrogation, and reflection have focused primarily on their roles and responsibilities with respect to slavery and the slave trade, resulting in a wide and impressive array of campus-based research projects.1 It is equally essential that colleges and universities understand and address the place of settler colonialism in the past, present, and future of their institutions. As conveners of an upcoming symposium titled "Campuses and Colonialism," we take inspiration as well from decades of work by scholars in Native American and Indigenous studies and allied disciplines who have investigated the histories of settler colonialism at their institutions as part of their "service" to NAIS initiatives, programs, and departments.2 "Campuses and Colonialism" will amplify the research of scholars investigating experiences of Indigenous peoples at campuses across the United States and beyond. Our call for contributors acknowledged the diversity of research questions and methodologies shaping this work and yielded dozens of proposals, ranging from reconsiderations of the "founding" stories of early American colleges, to [End Page 151] universities' troubled history of collecting Native material culture, to the contemporary struggles of Native students to transform institutions into places where they can belong. As conveners, we take particular inspiration from ongoing work at two of the campuses with which we are affiliated: the University at Buffalo and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. These local stories suggest the power and the potential of LGU for reckoning with the history of land-taking, even where that project's focus does not capture the central features of colonization on particular campuses. As we grapple with institutions' involvement with settler colonialism in New York State and Wisconsin we must look to periods and policies prior to the 1862 Morrill Act. In the territories currently known as western New York and Wisconsin, land cessions occurred much earlier than in the western regions of the continent where public lands acquired through negotiation or theft are connected to the Morrill Act. Following the Revolutionary War at the close of the eighteenth century, land speculators, including war financier Robert Morris and principals of the Holland Land Company, used every trick in the book to expropriate Haudenosaunee territory, the homelands of the Six Nations. By 1797 they had succeeded in their goal. According to the terms of the Treaty of Big Tree, the Seneca Nation ceded 3.3 million acres in exchange for $100,000. Through this agreement the Seneca Nation retained eleven reservation territories: six along the Genesee River and five farther west.3 Joseph Ellicott, working on behalf of the Holland Land Company, supervised teams of surveyors establishing towns and ranges that were later incorporated into a map of the region used to promote land sales, American settlement, and the transformation of Haudenosaunee territory into "settler sovereign landscapes" during the early nineteenth century.4 Ellicott, who became resident-agent for the company shortly after he concluded the survey, played a key role in this transformation. Working from 1800 through 1826, he developed and implemented the company's plan to sell land acquired through...

Editors' Introduction: Reflections on the Land-Grab Universities Project

Editors' Introduction:Reflections on the Land-Grab Universities Project K. Tsianina Lomawaima (bio), Kelly McDonough (bio), Jean M. O'Brien (bio), and Robert Warrior (bio) on march 30, 2020, the self-described "independent, nonprofit 501(c)3 media organization" High Country News (HCN) published under their Education section "Land-Grab Universities: Expropriated Indigenous Land Is the Foundation of the University System" by Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone (https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities), "How We Investigated the Land-Grant University System" by Robert Lee (https://www.hcn.org/articles/indigenous-affairs-education-how-we-investigated-the-land-grant-university-system), and "Lost and Found: The Story of Land-Grant Universities" by Tristan Ahtone under Editor's Note (https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/editors-note-lost-and-found-the-story-of-land-grant-universities). Ahtone (Kiowa) was at the time of publication Indigenous affairs editor at HCN; as this issue goes to press he is the editor in chief at the Texas Observer. Lee is a lecturer in American history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Selwyn College. With stunning photographs by journalist and photographer Kalen Goodluck (Diné, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Tsimshian) and compelling maps by cartographer Margaret Pearce (Citizen Band Potawatomi), Land-Grab Universities (LGU) sets a new bar for investigative journalism and innovative scholarship in Indigenous lands. In addition to these articles, the project's web portal with interactive maps (by Robert Lee, Tristan Ahtone, Margaret Pearce, Kalen Goodluck, Geoff McGhee, Cody Leff, Katherine Lanpher, and Taryn Salinas) is available at https://www.landgrabu.org/, and the database is accessible at https://github.com/HCN-Digital-Projects/landgrabu-data. Within days, Native scholars across the country were abuzz, sharing the LGU project links with one another and with presidents, chancellors, [End Page 89] provosts, and deans at their academic institutions (whether land-grant universities or not). Impressed with the project's scope, impact on institutions of higher education in the United States, and import for Indigenous studies scholars around the world, editors in the NAIS review collective agreed that LGU warranted extensive evaluation in an Intervention and quickly moved to recruit essays from scholars across the interdisciplinary arenas of critical Indigenous studies, American studies, geography, cartography, economics, digital humanities, history, and higher education. The Intervention includes twelve commentaries and concludes with the transcript of an interview with Lee and Ahtone, who comment on the project, answer questions from the editors, and respond to the multidisciplinary perspectives on their work gathered in this issue. As of October 2020, as this issue is being prepared for our publisher, the University of Minnesota Press, university administrators, faculty, staff, and students are responding to or mobilizing in support of the LGU call for acknowledgment of the massive Indigenous land dispossession and the subsequent enrichment of university endowments documented by the project and for responsibility to the Indigenous caretakers and stewards whose lands and resources have underwritten so much of the U.S. higher education system (including lands dispossessed through means other than the Morrill Act). At Cornell University, the beneficiary of the greatest endowment wealth by far from Indigenous lands and/or scrip distributed by the Morrill Act, the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program has formed a faculty committee to examine the issue and publish a blog (https://blogs.cornell.edu/cornelluniversityindigenousdispossession/). At the University of California, Berkeley, the Centers for Educational Justice & Community Engagement organized webinars in September and October 2020 entitled "The UC Land Grab: A Legacy of Profit from Indigenous Lands" (https://cejce.berkeley.edu/uc-land-grab). The LGU project has also generated significant media attention, such as Scalawag magazine's indictment of the University of North Carolina (https://scalawagmagazine.org/2020/09/indian-land-university-profit/). We are confident that LGU will continue to generate interest, controversy, self-reflection, and hopefully self-improvement within higher education institutions and, most importantly, further research into the tangible realities and consequences of Indigenous land dispossession, the enduring character of Indigenous sovereignty, and the remarkable resilience of Indigenous peoples. [End Page 90] K. Tsianina Lomawaima k. tsianina lomawaima, coeditor of NAIS, is retired from the School of Social Transformation...