The Work of Cornell University for Agriculture

The Work of Cornell University for Agriculture is a report or address by Jacob Gould Schurman, the Canadian born American academic and diplomat who lived from 1854 to 1942 and who served as president of Cornell University from 1892 to 1920. Schurman was one of the leading American university presidents of his generation and was substantially involved in the broader development of American higher education during the period when the major American research universities were establishing themselves as central institutions in American intellectual and economic life.

Cornell University had been founded in 1865 as one of the first American land grant universities under the Morrill Act of 1862, the federal legislation that established the broader system of state land grant institutions devoted to practical education in agriculture, mechanical arts, and the various other subjects that the developing American economy required. Cornell’s particular constitution combined the land grant mission with the substantial private endowment provided by Ezra Cornell, the founder, and the resulting institution attempted to combine the practical educational mission of the land grant tradition with the broader liberal arts and research mission of a substantial private university.

The agricultural mission of Cornell was central to its identity from the beginning. The New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell, established in 1904 as a state supported college within the broader Cornell structure, became one of the leading American institutions of agricultural research, education, and extension work. The college served the substantial New York state agricultural community and contributed substantially to the broader American agricultural science that transformed American farming across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Schurman’s report or address on the agricultural work of Cornell presents the institutional case for the substantial state and private investment in this work, with attention to the specific research, teaching, and extension activities that the various Cornell programmes carried out. The document belongs to the substantial body of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American university literature that defended and explained the developing American research university model to the broader public and political audiences whose support the universities required.

The book is of interest now to historians of American higher education, of American agricultural science, and of the development of the American land grant university system during its formative decades. It pairs naturally with the broader institutional literature of Cornell and with the various other early twentieth century American university and agricultural college publications.