Upcoming Conferences

Vol. 41, No. 3, July 2012
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America's Land-Grant University System at 150th: A Group Looks Back

By Alan I. Marcus (Mississippi State University)

Mississippi State University, 3–6 October 2012

On 3–6 October 2012, Mississippi State University will hold a gathering of historians to mark the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Land Grant College Act. That Act provided U.S. federal support to establish colleges in each state to extend higher education to the masses. Presently there are over 70 land-grant institutions and every state has at least one. Land grants are among the nation's best known and most prestigious public universities. They include the University of Wisconsin, Texas A & M, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California, Cornell, Kansas State, University of Florida, and, of course, Mississippi State.

The Morrill Act was a comparably simple piece of legislation. It aimed at the children of farmers and mechanics, seeking to "promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life." The act specifically mentioned the kinds of courses these new institutions could offer: scientific and classical studies, military tactics and "teaching branches of learning related to agriculture and the mechanic arts." But the way that its key objective should be carried out was critical. The act mandated that it should be achieved in a manner that the state legislatures "may respectively prescribe."

Placing the power to fulfill the terms of the act in individual state legislatures meant that these new educational entities would develop differentially in time and place. It also made them exquisitely susceptible to political pressure. They were, after all, public institutions established to undertake a public good. Various groups tried to form, shape and even co-opt them, stretching them beyond their initial mission. The new schools needed to be responsive to keep their funding and their faculty. Congress's enactment of the Hatch Act in 1887, which created agricultural experiment stations, added an additional layer of complexity to land grants. States generally joined the new stations to these schools, which formally recognized scientific and technical investigation as a central land-grant function. These several dimensions persist within land grants to the present day. Colleges readily acknowledge shifting balance and focus in response to external forces. They consider flexibility an important factor in achieving their difficult mission. Land-grant universities pride themselves on their history of service to their constituencies and engagement with their communities.

Those are the broad parameters of the land-grant college ethos. These schools have been involved in virtually every major technological, scientific, educational and cultural initiative since their creation. They have worked to help re-engineer American society and life, spawning innovation, social movements, crass products, hope and discontent. They stand as monuments to the idea of a government-education nexus, a foundation on which government has built access to education among its citizens, advancing the idea that state-supported, educational institutions should be subservient to social goals as they advance these goals.

That is and has been a broad, complicated and often contentious agenda. What that meant, how it was determined, and what were its consequences over the past 150 years are the subjects of this historical conference.

Some forty historians from all over the United States will gather at Mississippi State for what I call a "cerebration" of the legacy of this monumental act. This group will not simply sing the praises of land grants but rather explore their various ramifications and iterations more critically. It will seek to learn about them, why their presidents, boards, directors, and faculties made the choices that they did and to evaluate how those choices turned out.

The conference will be wide-ranging and freewheeling. Some papers will discuss certain aspects of the land-grant experience locked in time and place, while others will trace a particular function of the colleges or field of knowledge over an expanse of time and in many states. Still others will explore aspects of the land grants that no longer persist, seeking to determine how they rose and why they disappeared. Others will determine the consequences of various land-grant policies on specific American subpopulations.

This will be a working meeting. Conference participants are expected to discuss papers and approaches with each other with the objective of sharpening arguments and tightening focus. It is anticipated that this interaction among participants will generate certain themes and intellectual structures around which to organize land-grant history.

That last desideratum is crucially important. Two volumes of conference proceedings will emerge from this meeting. Put baldly, this conference aims to establish in one place a good portion of the land-grant experience. Various colleges and universities have their particularistic histories. But there is no broad-based history of the land-grant movement as it has played out over the past 150 years. This is true even in the areas that the land grants have special renown, such as the agricultural sciences and engineering. This meeting will begin to redress that unfortunate omission. It will provide an outline of some of the major lines of action that have constituted the land-grant experience. These volumes will give the conference permanence, solidity. Presentations disappear into the ether. Books are less ephemeral; they can be consulted, cited or criticized over decades or centuries.

The relative lack of scholarship on land-grant, agricultural science and engineering efforts is as disappointing as it is surprising. Many of these schools have long had departments or specialties in the history of science or the history of technology. Yet few faculty members have chosen to examine land-grant endeavors. Such an omission is troubling. Land-grant universities and their experiment stations have been intimately involved in almost every life science initiative in the three quarters of a century prior to 1950. Computers, fax machines, airplanes, the atomic bomb and most other major technological changes that have marked the past century owe at least part of their existence to land-grant-college work. Social science theories and applications often had their initial moment at these important schools.

The list goes on and on. Land-grant colleges and universities have had a profound influence on American society. They remain an essential part of the intellectual, political, social and economic fabric of what defines America. That critical centrality deserves explication. This conference serves as a beginning of that endeavor.

For more information about the conference, please see its website:
http://www.history.msstate.edu/MorrillActWebSite/MorrillIndex.html

Ex Certa Scientia: Literature, Science and the Arts—An International Conference

Porto, Portugal, 13–15 December 2012

This conference aims to respond to the intense interest that interdisciplinary and intermedial designs have obtained in many of the areas of study pertaining not only to literature and the arts but also to the sciences. It will lay a significant emphasis on the ways in which the discourses of literature, film, painting, music and other such cultural practices become interwoven with the discourses of science; and, conversely, on the ways in which the practices and theories of science reach beyond their more conventional boundaries and into the fields of artistic creativity and the humanities. The conference is meant to commemorate the 350th anniversary of a major event in the history of science and scientific institutions: the granting of the Charter to the Royal Society of London by King Charles II in 1662. The range of the conference, however, will be considerably broader: the program will accommodate participants with interests as diverse as literary studies, the arts, the language of art history and art criticism, writing and performance, the philosophy of science, and the history of scientific inquiry and scientific institutions.

As indicated by the number in its title, this conference is the second in a series of academic events that reflect the ongoing concerns of the eponymous research group (Relational Forms), based at CETAPS (the Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies). Registration details will be posted online in September 2012. All delegates are responsible for their own travel arrangements and accommodation. Relevant information will be provided later on the conference website—http://web.letras.up.pt/scientia.

The conference is organized by the Relational Forms research group (http://www.cetaps.com/). For further queries please contact relational@letras.up.pt.

CFP: Second World Congress on Environmental History

Guimarães, Portugal, 7–14 July 2014

Environmental history at an international scale and with global reach burst into the scholarly world with the first World Congress of Environmental History held in 2009 at the Universities of Roskilde and Malmö, Denmark. The Congress attracted hundreds of delegates. Based on the success of the conference the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations (ICEHO) has been formally established and membership is growing. (See http://www.iceho.org)

Planning for the Second World Congress of Environmental History is now well advanced. The theme of the Congress, "Environmental History in the Making," aims to create synergy among all scholars engaged in environmental history, to fathom the reach of the field and to investigate its focus areas and theoretical underpinnings. In line with the aims of ICEHO, the broad objective is to foster international communication and collaboration, to share information and disseminate research and to discuss issues, concerns and challenges relevant to the field. Thus, for the second time environmental historians from all over the world—senior academics and young scholars—with different disciplinary backgrounds will meet in a global forum to further the development of environmental history world-wide. Proposals may address any area of environmental history. The Program Committee specifically solicits submissions of new and original work that offers fresh perspectives for environmental history as well as exploring sources and methods. The conference covers all periods of human history and we welcome scholars from a range of disciplines. The conference language is English.

The Congress will be arranged around panels of 3 or 4 original papers. Individual papers will be accepted, but are more difficult to place in panels. Roundtables will be organized for postgraduate researchers to submit work in progress. There will also be poster sessions. In order to be accepted for the program, you will need to reconfirm your participation and register for the conference. Abstracts will be submitted online. Notification will be by e-mail. Review Process: All panels, papers, or posters will be reviewed by the Program Committee in an anonymous process to ensure the highest scholarly standards. Each paper will be reviewed independently by at least three members of the Program Committee.

The Conference will be held in Guimarães, Portugal, 7 to 14 July 2014. The deadline for the Call for Papers is 30 May 2013. Further Information: www.wceh2014.org;
www.wceh2014.ecum.uminho.pt/Default.aspx?tabid=1&pageid=35&lang=en-US

History of Science Society