Imagine a country where enemy combatants terrorize citizens at home and at work, where civil hostilities tear apart families, and where the largest share of the nation’s treasury fuels domestic warfare. That place was the United States in 1862. At that time, during the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed the law that created the states’ land-grant universities. Weeks earlier, Lincoln had signed the Homestead Act and established the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It would seem that the nation’s leaders, at a moment of national crisis, saw education and agriculture as necessary to national security.
How much do we still depend on education and agriculture? What is the legacy of the land-grant university in the twenty-first century?
Before 1862, higher education was a privilege for the wealthy, patterned after the European class system. A college education was generally available if you were wealthy, white, and male. You would study Latin, literature, law, or the classics at a private school. Education of the working class was left to guilds, where tradesmen instructed apprentices, or to seminaries, where clergymen taught religious novices. In the young United States, a few well-educated planters studied scientific agriculture, but generally it was the pioneering yeoman farmers who tilled the soil in the same way their grandfathers had back in the old country.
The idea of education for all people was revolutionary. There was nothing else like it in the world. At the beginning of the industrial revolution and the massive migration into the western United States, the land-grant universities represented a radical idea: public education is fundamental to the nation’s economic development.
With the radical idea that research was fundamental to the nation’s economic development, Congress passed the Hatch Act in 1887, which established a network of Agricultural Experiment Stations. And in 1914, at the onset of World War I, Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act that established the Extension Service to deliver research- based education to all people, reinforcing the idea that education is fundamental to a strong nation. UAF is Alaska’s land-grant university, and the radical ideas of public education, practical research, and the Extension Service are written into its mission.
The Alaska Agricultural Experiment Station was established in 1898 in Sitka and branches were later opened in Kodiak, Kenai, Rampart, Copper Center, Fairbanks, and the Matanuska Valley. The latter two remain as the Fairbanks Experiment Farm and the Matanuska Experiment Farm. The USDA established the Fairbanks experiment station in 1906 on a site that in 1915 provided land for the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines. In 1931, the experiment station was transferred from federal ownership to the college, and in 1935 the college was renamed the University of Alaska. Early experiment station researchers developed adapted cultivars of grains, grasses, potatoes, and berries, and introduced many vegetable cultivars appropriate to Alaska. Animal management was also important. This work continues, as does research in soils and revegetation, forest ecology and management, and rural and economic development. The station is administered through the UAF School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences. As the state faces new challenges in agriculture and resource management, the AFES continues to bring state-of-the-art research information to the people of Alaska. Scientists are improving crops and learning ways to keep water clean and soil healthy. UAF Cooperative Extension Service has faculty working throughout the state, where they deliver research-based education to communities, industries, and youth.
"This is where food security begins," SNRAS Dean and AFES Director Carol Lewis said. "We are your land grant. Own it, love it, and we'll love you back."
(This article was adapted in part from the Summer 2010 Oregon's Agricultural Progress magazine, Oregon State University, by Peg Herring, editor.)
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