History of Psychology

The last decades of the nineteenth century in the United States saw greater educational opportunities and increased support for science and learning. Legislation for public universities had first passed in 1858 but was vetoed by President Buchanan. More successful was an act sponsored by Senator Justin Morrill of Vermont and signed by President Lincoln on July 2, 1862. Senatorial opponents of the Bill from southern states had left Congress at the beginning of the Civil War. The Morrill Act’s goal was to make higher education available to all young people in the United States who had the desire and ability to profit from a college education. In the words of the act:

Grants of 30,000 acres of federal land for each member of Congress were made to the states. Proceeds from the land sales were to be invested in “safe stocks to yield not less than 5%.” Those funds would finance the new people’s universities and pay their students’ fees. Not all states chose to exercise this land grant option. But in those that did we see today universities with either the words Agriculture and Mechanics (A & M) or State in their names. Their land grant heritage is uniquely American. For their students, land grant universities were a path to a better life, to the American dream. One student recalled: “The classrooms were bare, the chairs and desks of the plainest. But as against that were the students. We knew it as a Gospel truth that this plain College was for each of us a passport to a higher and enabled life” (Jennings, 1989).