Socialist Higher Education - It Has Ice Cream

LINCOLN, Nebraska — The agriculture school at the university here runs a killer ice-cream stand. I'm not kidding. This might be the best example of the benefits of big government since the GI Bill. There is an ice cream stand here because there is an agriculture school here, and there is an agriculture school here because there is a university here, and there is a university here because of something called the Morrill Act, which is 150 years old this year.

On July 2, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the first Morrill Act, by which the federal government granted each state 30,000 acres of public land for each member of Congress the state had. In  turn, the states were supposed to sell the land and put the money into an endowment for the construction and maintenance of institutions of higher learning. Hence, we have the land-grant colleges that have provided us with, among other things, so much really good college football down through the years. A little less than two months earlier, Lincoln had signed the Homestead Act of 1862, which guaranteed that there would be students to attend those universities in perpetuity.

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It is also something to remember in these days in which we are told, relentlessly, the fairy tale of individual American initiative and FREEEEEDOOOOMMMMMMMMMMM! as though some plucky "entrepreneur" woke up in Seward one day and thought, "Think I'll start me the University Of Nebraska today." It is also something to remember in these days when the notion of "public lands" in the first place is under assault as a restriction on the essential constitutional freedom of oil derricks.

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It is also something to remember in these days when it is being argued that the administration should have gone for financial reform first, before health-care, because the system can only handle one big thing at a time. Lincoln signed the Morrill Act and the Homestead Act while he was commanding one side of a bloody Civil War. Used to be we could do three things at once.

  Charlie Pierce