EDUCATION

As Ohio State marks 150 years, has its land-grant mission evolved?

Jennifer Smola
jsmola@dispatch.com
Aerial drone photo of the Oval at the Ohio State University on Nov. 24, 2017.

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, staff and employees, 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 land-grant mission.”

The land grant is a “big idea,” said Nathan Sorber, an associate professor at the Center for the Future of Land-Grant 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 in the 1990s, after the admissions decision was made . “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 Grant-eligible. 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 real-world 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

This November 10, 1957 file photo, shows an aerial view of the Oval and Thompson Library at Ohio State University.