Overview

Established by the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862, America’s land-grant universities have had far-reaching influences on the United States and the world. Service as Mandate, Alan I Marcus’s second edited collection of insightful essays about land-grant universities, explores how these universities have adapted to meet the challenges of the past sixty-five years and how, having done so, they have helped to create the modern world. From their founding, land-grant schools have provided educational opportunities to millions, producing many of the nation’s scientific, technical, and agricultural leaders and spawning countless technological and agricultural innovations. Nevertheless, their history has not always been smooth or without controversy or setbacks. These vital centers of learning and research have in fact been redefined and reconceptualized many times and today bear only a cursory resemblance to their original incarnations. The thirteen essays in this collection explore such themes as the emphasis on food science and home economics, the country life movement, the evolution of a public research system, the rise of aerospace engineering, the effects of the GI Bill, the teaching of military science, the sustainable agriculture movement, and the development of golf-turf science. Woven together, these expertly curated scenes, vignettes, and episodes powerfully illustrate these institutions’ ability to flex and adapt to serve the educational needs of an ever-changing American citizenry. By dint of their mission to remedy social, economic, and technical problems; to improve standards of living; and to enhance quality of life, land-grant universities are destined and intended to be agents of change—a role that finds them at times both celebrated and hotly contested, even vilified. A readable and fascinating exploration of land-grant universities, Service as Mandate offers educators, policy makers, students, and the wider communities land-grant universities serve a vital exploration of these dynamic institutions.

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Reviews

This collection of essays by leading scholars in their respective fields demonstrates the centrality of land-grant institutions for the United States during the last hundred years. Although the essays included in this volume are a must for historians of twentieth-century US higher education, the range of issues documented and analyzed will also make the volume extremely valuable to historians in a variety of other fields: military history, gender studies, the history of disciplines, and agricultural history, to name only some. Marcus has done a fine job of editing this diverse collection. Marc Rothenberg, editor of The Papers of Joseph Henry and The History of Science in the United States: An Encyclopedia

Author Information

Alan I Marcus is the editor of Science as Service: Establishing and Reformulating American Land-Grant Universities, 1865–1930 and the author or coauthor of several publications, including The Future Is Now: Science and Technology Policy in the United States Since 1950; Cancer from Beef: The DES Controversy, Federal Food Regulation, and Consumer Confidence in Modern America; and Technology in America: A Brief History.

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