Sponsored Projects for Undergraduate Research

The goal of this project is to identify the location and history of the parcels of land that were granted by the federal government to establish the University of California. Currently, little information is available about what lands made up California’s 150,000 acre land grant. The project will combine historical research into the parcels and their long-term histories, culminating in a map that shows their locations and key aspects of their stories. The Morrill Act of 1862 authorized the establishment of land grant universities and is widely credited with creating a system of public higher education in the United States. To fund these new public universities each state received a grant of federal lands: 30,000 acres for each senator and house representative. Proceeds from the management or sale of these lands were used to establish and provide ongoing financial support for these new public-serving universities. The State of California received 150,000 acres of federal land, which enabled it to create the University of California in 1868. These public universities, or ‘land-grant’ institutions, expanded to include what is today each state’s Cooperative Extension program to support research and training for farmers and natural resource managers.

The mid-19th century was also an era of mass dislocation and land theft from Native Americans, and the origins of the granted land can raise important ethical issues for land-grant universities. South Dakota State University (SDSU), for example, recognized that the lands it received from the federal government originally belonged to the Dakota and Lakota Tribes and were promised to them by the federal government in an 1868 treaty. In acknowledgement of this history and the fact that members of the state’s contemporary tribal community were underrepresented in the student body, SDSU started an initiative--funded by the annual income from their land grant--to increase tribal members’ access to higher education. Iowa State University has also undertaken a project to identify and map the parcels that comprised their original land grant, but have chosen to trace the histories of those parcels forward in time, telling the stories of contemporary landowners.