An important historical assessment of this complicity is Craig Steven Wilder's Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities. In recent years, some colleges and universities have begun to address their complicity in the institution of slavery. Footnote 3 This article builds on that work by finding out which parcels of land were sold under the Morrill Act, tracing those parcels back to the tribes that earlier were dispossessed from the land, and then connecting the sales to the specific land-grant institutions that benefited. Scholar Sharon Stein laid some of the conceptual groundwork for understanding the links between the existence of land-grant colleges and the processes of colonization and of accumulation of land and capital. What land was sold? How did the US government have claim to that land? To what extent are land-grant colleges founded on dispossessing American Indians from their land? This article sets out to answer these questions.

Land-grant institutions depended on the federal government selling land. These are important revisions to the story, but they do not directly address the question of the land itself.

Revisions to the historical narrative have focused on the extent to which “the people” actually wanted access to higher education the extent to which applied sciences and technology really replaced the liberal arts in these institutions and the extent to which land-grant colleges democratized education, given that they did not fully include women, and the Morrill Act of 1890 also provided a structure that supported continued segregation of African Americans in the South. The 150th anniversary of the land grants occurred in 2012, and while the celebration was laudatory, historians also took the opportunity to rethink the narrative about the Land-Grant Acts and the meaning, purposes, and impacts of the colleges and universities. Because of this, in the nineteenth century, the land-grant institutions were commonly referred to as “democracy's colleges.” Footnote 1 The Morrill Act specifically set out to provide education in the areas of agriculture and applied science and therefore was seen as a move away from “elite” liberal arts education. The Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862, also called the Morrill Act (and the successor Morrill Act of 1890), made public land available to states to sell, with the profits going toward establishing and supporting public colleges and universities. Land-grant colleges and universities have long been lauded for democratizing higher education.

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