Sen. Justin Morrill helped open higher ed to ‘working class, women, minorities, and immigrants’: biographer
The student government at Michigan State University is calling again for the removal of former U.S. Sen. Justin Morrill’s name from Agricultural Hall.
A 19th century Republican lawmaker, Morrill was an abolitionist and the lead author of land-grant acts that helped establish public universities like Michigan State.
However, student Kaylin Casper told the Associated Students of MSU during a meeting last week that Morrill’s legislation was “harmful,” according to The State News.
Casper’s bill calling on the university to strip the senator’s name from Agricultural Hall passed with one abstention; it also asks other Big Ten campuses to do the same, the report states.
“I am native Anishinaabekwe,” Casper said. “I’m representing my own community, not just me. He was harmful because his actions led to forceful dispossession, which is why I want his name removed.”
Casper represents the North American Indigenous Student Organization.
Also advocating for the name removal was Black Students’ Alliance representative Missy Chola, according to the report.
“I don’t believe that it is on us to speak on (rebut) something like this,” Chola said. “If that community has said that this is something that makes them feel the way it makes them feel, it is for us to support them and to be there for them and to vote with them.”
The student government passed a similar resolution in 2021, arguing the university sits on “stolen land,” The College Fix reported at the time.
“The Morrill Act stole approximately 10.7 million acres of land from about 250 Native American Tribes,” which displaced many of them, the 2021 resolution stated.
However, a biography of Morrill published by Michigan State University Press portrays his legacy in a different light. According to the summary wrote:
His legacy, inspired by the Jeffersonian ideal of an educated electorate, revolutionized American higher education. Prior to this legislation, colleges and universities were open primarily to affluent white men and studies were limited largely to medicine, theology, and philosophy. Morrill’s land-grant acts eventually opened American higher education to the working class, women, minorities, and immigrants. Since 1862, more than 20 million people have graduated from the 104 land-grant colleges and universities spawned by his grand vision. In this long-overdue study, [biographer Coy] Cross shows the “Father of Land-Grant Colleges” to be one of America’s formative nineteenth- century political figures.
Morrill also is recognized “for framing of the Fourteenth Amendment that granted equal protection and rights to freed slaves,” according to a short biography by the Vermont government.
Other historic figures also have been the target of campus cancel culture in recent years.
They include “Star Spangled Banner” author Francis Scott Key, U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall, Plymouth Colony leader Myles Standish, and General Robert E. Lee’s horse.
MORE: Cornell accused of ‘profiting from acts of colonial violence’ against Native Americans
IMAGE: University of College/Shutterstock
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