Are the Land-Grant Universities Land-Grabs?

The concept of "land-grab universities" was so polarizing in 2021 that I was unable to research the actual history of the land-grants while I was at UW-Madison.

I knew when I started researching the controversy over whether organic farming could feed the world that I’d need to delve into the history of the land-grant universities. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to do that while I was in grad school because everyone was too hung up on the term “land-grant” to talk about actual university history. Most of the discussion revolved around an article titled “Land-Grab Universities.” The authors of this article, Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, spent a huge amount of time and effort tracking down every parcel of land granted to US agricultural universities by the federal government by the Morrill Act of 1862. They created a cool interactive map showing the exact parcels of land that were granted to each university.

Unfortunately, the takeaway that many people got from the article was that the land-grant universities stole land from Indigenous people. It didn’t help that the authors included slightly misleading statements like “millions of acres of Indigenous land [were] sold to endow the land-grant universities of the United States” and that the land was “unwillingly donated by tribal nations.” Since the land originally belonged to Indigenous people, and since the methods the United States used to acquire that land became increasingly coercive, unfair, and violent as the country expanded west, the reasoning went that the universities were responsible for Indigenous dispossession. Result: A huge flood of land acknowledgements at land-grant universities.

As I (unsuccessfully) tried to make clear at the time, I am totally open to talking about the history of how the United States acquired land from Indigenous people for westward expansion. I acknowledge that bad stuff went on, that the treaties were forced, unfair, and didn’t give them anywhere near the real value of their land, that they were swindled, hoodwinked, coerced, and taken advantage of. I personally think the word “stolen” is too simplistic to describe the complexity of how those land transfers took place, especially since it was all technically legal, but I definitely agree that it’s not a chapter of US history to be proud of.

But as someone who cares about the details, I don’t think it’s accurate to blame the universities for Indigenous dispossession. Doing so completely ignores the historical order of events. After the Revolution, the United States didn’t have any money, so the nascent government promised to pay its soldiers in land. The problem was, it didn’t have much land, either. So it started acquiring land from the Native Americans in a series of increasingly unfair treaties, fueling the growth of the new country with periodic infusions of new, cheap land.

The federal government sold this land to homesteaders, speculators, miners, and loggers at giveaway prices. It granted 130 million acres of land to private railroad companies and 77 million acres to establish public K-12 schools. And in 1862, after westward expansion was well underway, the Morrill Act allocated 11 million acres to establish state agricultural universities. The land granted or sold by the federal government was no longer “Indigenous land”—the Indigenous title had been legally “extinguished” and the land was now in the public domain.

So I don’t think the term “land-grab university” is historically accurate, because the universities did not “grab” land from anybody. The federal government did—call the US a “land-grab nation,” if you’d like—but that was before the universities existed. The land-grant universities have been criticized for a lot of things over the years, as I’ll talk about in the next few posts. But we should take “stealing land from Indigenous people” off the list of accusations.