A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

Merely refocusing the few existing institutions was not enough; the United States required a comprehensive network of universities, and this meant federal resources. To accomplish this, Senator Justin Morrill, a founder of the Republican Party, proposed massive federal intervention (a rather different sort of radical Republican agenda than we see today). Morrill wanted the government to contribute land whose sale would fund colleges to, “without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics… teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts… [and] promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.”7 The Morrill Act of 1862 provided over seventeen million federal acres for those purposes, an area slightly larger than the state of West Virginia. The act was successful: many state colleges like Ohio State, Rutgers, Texas A&M, and University of California, Berkeley had origins as land-grant institutions, as did some prominent private universities including Cornell and MIT.* The first Morrill Act passed only after Southern legislators seceded; they had opposed the Act ostensibly on constitutional grounds but substantially because higher education didn’t fit with their conservative, religious, anti-industrial, plantation mentality.