This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862. Mississippi State University, being a land grant university, was established and still receives funds through this piece of legislation. MSU will be celebrating the anniversary of the Morrill Act in several ways this year.
One of the scheduled events is the Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C. There, 18 universities will be represented, and MSU will have three projects on display: the EcoCar, the mobile veterinary clinic and a demonstration on the benefits of thermal imaging technology in improving health and well-being of domestic and companion animals.
Peter Ryan, associate provost for Academic Affairs and president of Gamma Sigma Delta, said MSU will be a major part of the event.
“We are actually the big gorilla at this event,” Ryan said.
Last Thursday, James Giesen, assistant professor in the department of history, presented a lecture titled “History of the Morrill Act: The Mississippi Perspective,” which was open to the public. His lecture was the inaugural spring seminar of Gamma Sigma Delta honor society.
Giesen began by saying the simplicity of the Morrill Act itself had little effect on its success.
“This piece of legislation is hard to get a handle on from a historical perspective,” Giesen said. “There really isn’t much to it from a legal history perspective, but its impact has been incredibly far-reaching.”
Giesen said he views the act as a story about citizenship and as a depiction of how each level of government interacts with its citizenry. He said the history of the Morrill Act is really the history of America. The West was still seen as a desert because it was empty. However, it would no longer be a desert if someone farmed it, he said. Thus, the land grant act was established to fund the education of American citizens who would then farm the West.
 
The Morrill Act was passed in 1862 during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, which was also during the Civil War. It gave federal land to each of the United States to fund colleges to teach agriculture and engineering, rephrased by Giesen as colleges for the industrial classes. The bill, however, stated land would not go to any state in rebellion against the United States.
Mark Keenum, MSU president, said the Morrill Act opened opportunities for many students, which is something to be prideful about.
“Enactment of the Morrill Act was the first in a series of steps that created the nation’s land-grant universities, which grew into the largest and most effective, public, higher-education system in the world. We take great pride in our land-grant heritage and the wide-ranging opportunities it has offered so many individuals over the years,” Keenum said. “From that solid foundation, Mississippi State continues to play a leadership role in educating the future leaders of our state and nation.”
Giesen said the two land-grant universities in Mississippi are Alcorn State University, which was originally the school for black Mississippians, and The Agricultural and Mechanical College of the State of Mississippi (now known as Mississippi State University), the school originally for white Mississippians. Only Kentucky and Mississippi funded seperate race-based land-grant colleges.
The first president of MSU, Stephen D. Lee, was a questionable candidate for the position, Giesen said.
“When students arrived in 1880, the board of trustees figured ‘Who better to put in charge of this federally-created school than a former confederate general whose only experience farming had been an abject failure?'” Giesen said.
Giesen said Lee quickly learned he was starting from scratch. Lee noticed the northern land-grant colleges had an advantageous head start, so he embraced the model of the northern colleges instead of rejecting it, as did other southern states. He took trips to study those northern land-grant universities and occasionally returned with faculty from the colleges whom he had convinced to come work in Starkville.
The rivalry between The University of Mississippi and MSU was evident as early as the 1890s, Giesen said. He said the rivalry took on powerful political meaning long before the two teams ever met on a football field.
“People in the state were making an important political statement by siding with one school over the other,” Giesen said. “The University of Mississippi represented the classical education, and A&M (now MSU) was about teaching the industrial classes a skill that they could use immediately.”
When Lee left office in 1899, one of his main achievements was he had industrialized southern agriculture by training a generation of new farmers, Giesen said. In the years that followed, the Morrill Act began to be less important to the way the school was run.
Giesen brought his speech to a close by predicting how the namesake for the piece of legislation would feel about the way the act has affected America.
“I think Morrill would be shocked at what the land-grant schools have become, and, though much of it would please him, I think in the end he might be disappointed at the way things are today,” Giesen said. “Certainly what would please him today would be the democratic nature of the university. He’d certainly be shocked and pleased at the amount of research the university does.”
He said the disappointment would come from Morrill seeing how the quality of life for Mississippi farmers fell within the 20th century. He also said Morrill would be dismayed at the fact that the Mississippi Delta, some of the richest farmland in the world, is home to some of the nation’s poorest citizens.
Giesen’s last statement was a summary of what he feels was the major effect of the Morrill Act.
“The Morrill Act laid the foundation for changing not only agriculture in Mississippi but the politics, as well,” Giesen said.