The First Morrill Act and Agricultural Settler Conquest: The Case of the University of California

• In Event: Race, Rurality, and Education: Envisioning Educational Equity in Racialized Rural Spaces

Abstract

Objectives and Theoretical Framework
The First Morrill Act of 1862 established colleges of agricultural and mechanic arts by granting so-called “public” land to each state “in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” (First Morrill Act, 1862, Section 4). This momentous legislation and the resulting “land grant universities” are lauded as the first major federal funding for higher education and for having brought the ideals of equality and opportunity to (white, male, Christian) Americans by reducing geographic and class barriers to education. Simultaneously, it served settler colonial interests via redistribution of Native American lands and institutionalization of agricultural knowledge production that has entrenched white supremacy through advancement of racial capitalism (e.g., Boggs et al., 2019; Lee & Ahtone, 2020; Stein, 2022). The Historically White Land Grant Universities (HWLGUs) in each state formed the backbone of U.S. public higher education and to this day function as premier institutions for agricultural education, research, and public outreach. In this presentation, the author uses theories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism to outline the ontological and epistemological contours of the First Morrill Act both as a land policy and educational policy that aimed to create white settler rurality (Alvarado, 2019) through agricultural higher education.

Methods and Data Sources
The author draws on primary and secondary historic materials to interrogate the specific case of the University of California (UC), which was founded as a land grant university in 1868 just two decades after the U.S. occupation of California.

Substantiated Conclusions
UC’s birth is entwined with the genocide of Native peoples of California and the state’s distinctive development as an agrarian racial capitalist society from the start of the U.S. occupation (Walker, 2004). Not only did the university play a key role in facilitating the quick development of agrarian racial capitalism by contributing to land speculation and settlement via First Morrill Act land sales, it simultaneously built its original Berkeley College of Agriculture and rural field stations to generate Eurocentric agricultural knowledge production to equip white settlers to permanently occupy Native lands up and down the state (Author, 2025).

Significance
Today, the UC Agricultural Experiment Station (consisting of Berkeley, Davis, Merced, Riverside, Santa Cruz, and the statewide Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources) still receives federal and state funding to carry out the mandate of the First Morrill Act to produce an educated workforce explicitly trained to serve each state’s agricultural and rural development needs. Yet it has only just begun to acknowledge its entanglement with the ongoing dispossession of California’s Native peoples (Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues & Native American Student Development, 2021). The HWLGUs in each state face the same challenge. Using the example of the University of California, the author proposes a series of integrated questions and actions that HWLGUs might undertake to begin the task of addressing their responsibilities to Native peoples via imagining lasting decolonial futures for agricultural education.

Author

• Rosalie Zdzienicka Fanshel, University of California - Berkeley