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3 C H A P T E R 1 Brief History of Universities, Community Partnerships, and Economic Development Universities, in addition to their central role in education, play a critical economic development role. Nowhere has the connection between higher education and economic development been more clearly drawn than in the United States. This link was made explicit in 1862 when Congress passed the Morrill Act, establishing a system of land-grant colleges by allocating federal land to the states to support the establishment of public universities in each state. As James Collier of Virginia Tech notes, while the Morrill Act certainly served to expand access to university education, its “primary goal was to solidify the American economic infrastructure in anticipation of the Civil War’s outcome.” Senator Justin Smith Morrill (R-VT) himself, in calling upon Congress to pass the Land-Grant Act, argued that land-grant colleges not only would provide education for the “sons of toil,” but would also speed growth in agriculture, “the foundation of all present and future prosperity.”1 Historically, community partnership work has not been as visible in U.S. higher education as economic development, but it too has deep historical roots.2 On the university end, one of the most obvious areas is the development of cooperative extension. Cooperative extension, from its founding, has been a program that supports a university-linked system of information transmission from state “land-grant” colleges and universities to the populace through a network of professional “extension agents” who provide public and outreach services. Cooperative extension continues to this day. Presently, extension offices exist in every county in the United States and employ over 15,000 people. Although cooperative extension is often seen as only dealing with rural areas, its impact has been far broader. An early innovator was the state of Wisconsin, which initiated its statewide cooperative extension program under the leadership of famed progressive activist Governor Robert La Follette, years before the federal government passed the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, setting aside federal funding for cooperative extension programs in every state. For example, in 1908, Extension Division programs in Wisconsin were conducted for urban schoolchildren C h a p t e r 1 4 and adults in a public health effort aimed at preventing tuberculosis; the following year, Extension Division professors helped Milwaukee conduct an economic survey of the city, “including studies of industrial hygiene and education, working conditions, hospitals, municipal health and sanitation problems.”3 On the community-initiated end, the settlement house movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also was an early initiator of what today might be called university-community partnership work. In its most frequent form, a settlement house was a building in a poor community that was used as a community center. Settlement houses taught literacy and urban survival skills to immigrants and rural migrants and helped organize tenants to secure better housing. Although settlement houses started off campus, university students often lived in the facilities and frequently provided much of the settlement houses’ staffing. Hull House, organized by Jane Addams in partnership with the University of Chicago, is one of the best known of these efforts. Addams, in particular, succeeded in getting prominent support for Hull House at the University of Chicago, among both the university administration and the faculty. It was also the University of Chicago’s first president, William Rainey Harper, who declared that the university should be the “Messiah of the democracy, its to-be-expected deliverer.” And of course it was as a faculty member at the University of Chicago where the philosopher John Dewey first developed his theories of “learning by doing” and experiential education. For a variety of reasons, the prominence of university-community partnerships and university economic development activity declined in the first half of the twentieth century. The reasons are not hard to discern: agriculture, once the foundation of “all” prosperity (in Morrill’s words) became less significant, as the United States became a primarily urban and metropolitan country and many land-grant colleges largely failed to shift the focus of their cooperative extension work to reflect the changing economy and growing urbanization. Also, the issues of rural-urban migration and immigration from abroad that had led to the settlement house movement in the first place subsided, as immigration laws restricted entry to the United States. Moreover, universities became increasingly linked to the federal government , especially through military research contracts, which made local community economic development activity relatively...

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