Thursday, January 30, 2014

A New Land Grant University?

Sort of:
The House Wednesday morning approved a bill that would make Central State University a land grant university.
The provision, included in the five-year farm bill, passed by a 251-166 vote.
Central State has sought land-grant status since 1890, when the federal government named more than a dozen historically black colleges and universities as land grant colleges. The designation means that schools are tasked with teaching practical agriculture, science, military science and engineering, but also makes schools eligible for federal dollars. Central State President Cynthia Jackson-Hammond said it will also help encourage research and new partnerships with other land grand colleges.She also said it would help as a recruitment tool for the university. The only other land grant institution in Ohio is Ohio State University.
"We are ecstatic," she said.
Reps. Mike Turner, R-Dayton, Marcia Fudge, D-Cleveland and Joyce Beatty, D-Jefferson Township were among those who worked on the measure in the House, though other members of the Ohio delegation cosponsored an amendment to designate Central State as a land grant institution or signed a letter supporting the move. Beatty is a Central State alumni. In the Senate, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, spearheaded the effort. Fudge and Brown were members of the Senate-House committee that crafted the final legislation, which now goes to the Senate.
"As Ohio's only public Historically Black College and University, this designation is long overdue," Turner said. "When CSU first sought land grant status over 120 years ago, it was intense political wrangling that denied CSU this designation. It is fitting that my Ohio colleagues in both the House and the Senate worked on a bipartisan, bicameral basis to see this through."
This seems a little odd, but it does highlight a strange little bit of history.  The Morrill Act of 1862 set up the land grant universities,which have educated generations of rural residents.  It was followed up by the Morrill Act of 1890 (the Agricultural College Act of 1890), which was passed to address discrimination in the former Confederate states:
A second Morrill Act in 1890 was also aimed at the former Confederate states. This act required each state to show that race was not an admissions criterion, or else to designate a separate land-grant institution for persons of color. Among the seventy colleges and universities which eventually evolved from the Morrill Acts are several of today's historically Black colleges and universities. Though the 1890 Act granted cash instead of land, it granted colleges under that act the same legal standing as the 1862 Act colleges; hence the term "land-grant college" properly applies to both groups.
Later on, other colleges such as the University of the District of Columbia and the "1994 land-grant colleges" for Native Americans were also awarded cash by Congress in lieu of land to achieve "land-grant" status.
Ohio looks to be the only state that wasn't a slave state or formerly part of a slave state (West Virginia) that would have a historically black college as a land grant institution.

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