The Origins of Federal help for greater Education revises the conventional interpretation of the land-grant university circulate, whose associations have been introduced into being by means of the 1862 Morrill Act to supply for "the liberal and useful schooling of the commercial classes." instead of being the inevitable final result of the unfolding dynamic of institutional and socioeconomic forces, Williams argues, it was once the energetic intervention and initiative of a handful of academic leaders that secured the universities' future—above all, the actions of George W. Atherton.

For approximately 3 many years, Atherton, who was once the 7th president of the Pennsylvania nation college, labored to safe constant federal monetary help for the schools, which of their early years obtained little the aid of the states they have been designed to profit. He additionally helped to enhance the associations as complete "national" universities grounded within the liberal arts and sciences—a belief that countered the existing view of the schools as generally agricultural schools.

Atherton grew to become the leading mover within the crusade to enact the 1887 Hatch Act, which inspired the institution of agricultural scan stations at land-grant schools. The act marked the federal government's first attempt to supply non-stop investment to analyze devices linked to greater schooling associations. on the comparable instances, Atherton performed a key position within the formation of the 1st organization of such associations: The organization of yankee Agricultural schools and scan Stations. It was once the organization that supplied the serious mass had to foyer Congress successively and to technique the numerous possibilities and threats the land-grant faculties confronted in the course of the 1885–1906 period.

Atherton was once additionally deeply taken with the crusade for the Morrill Act of 1890, which supplied long-sought annual appropriations to land-grant faculties for a huge diversity of educational courses and inspired regular progress in country help in the course of the 1890s.

Roger Williams strains the causes and strategies in the back of a chain of legislation that made the government irreversibly dedicated to investment larger schooling and clinical learn and gives wealthy new insights into the complexities, polarities, and inherent contradictions of the heritage of the yankee land-grant movement.