Five brick and stone entrance signs into MSU's campus proclaim the familiar phrase: "The pioneer land- grant college."
But the once all-agriculture school is no more, and MSU has transformed into a Big Ten institution with more than a dozen specialized colleges.
MSU officials say the land-grant philosophy of affordability and outreach has endured through the university's many changes - including six different names and exponential enrollment growth during the post-World War II years.
But from its humble beginnings in 1857, as the Agriculture College of the State of Michigan with only 81 students, MSU has evolved to a university of nearly 45,000 students in 15 colleges and changed its strong agriculture focus to a more eclectic blend of disciplines.
In its first years, the pioneer land grant created the agriculture and engineering majors, providing a new type of education for students who didn't fit into the elite colleges, such as the University of Michigan.
In 1873, almost one third of the agriculture college's graduates worked as farmers. College enrollment declined throughout the 1900s, with only about 7 percent of MSU undergraduates studying agriculture in 2004.
But officials say even as MSU continues to align itself more with non-land-grant universities - drawing far fewer students from the farm - it is striving to keep the land-grant ideals of affordability and inclusiveness that characterized the vision of the original college.
Still a land grant?
As MSU's academic offerings continued to expand and evolve, the original land-grant ideals of affordability and a more inclusive form of higher education are being questioned.
The term, "land grant," referred to legislation that granted 30,000 acres to every state for each member of Congress, said Bruce McCristal, a 1954 graduate and author of "The Spirit of Michigan State."
In 1862, seven years after the college was chartered in 1855, Michigan was granted 240,000 acres from the federal government, which was sold to buy MSU's current land, McCristal said.
At the time, attending a college such as MSU was gaining popularity among young farmers from Michigan's rural areas. But enrollment in the agriculture college has declined in the past 80 years.
From 1910 to 1931, the number of undergraduates enrolled in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources declined 23.3 percent.
Between World War II and the early 1990s, enrollment stayed fairly consistent, with about 10 percent of undergraduates enrolled in the college.
In 1994, 7.8 percent of undergraduates at MSU were enrolled in the agriculture college.
Today, about 7 percent of MSU students study agriculture.
That could be the result of the changing economy and society, with less of a reliance on the farming community, historians say.
"What land grant meant in 1855 is different than what it means now," said Gary Lemme, associate director of the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station.
"We change to parallel the needs of the state - we're not an ivory tower, the state is our campus."
MSU President Lou Anna Simon said declining enrollment in the college represents the societal evolution of the United States away from agriculture, but not away from the land-grant philosophy.
"It's the natural evolution of society - the needs of society have changed dramatically," she said.
Simon said although most students might equate land-grant institution with agriculture, the principles of outreach and extension that were once only coupled with agriculture are now extended to all disciplines within the university.
"Part of the pressures of today is how you balance a much more complex world with the heart of the land grant," she said. "A land grant is as much sending back those people now in a broad array of disciplines and professions."
Keith Widder, a former curator of history for the Mackinac Island State Park Commission, likened MSU's natural move away from agriculture to a healthy evolution, but suggested that although the university can offer farm-centered programs, it has lost its original focus.
"It's always a point of contention of many farmers that the (agriculture) college is not producing enough practical farmers, that too many grads are doing things not with farming," he said.
"Even careers in things related to agriculture didn't count - if you didn't go back to the farm, college wasn't doing its job."
But Lemme said the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources acts as an objective avenue for students to study.
"If their career goal is to go into production agriculture, they have both the technical and problem-solving skills to allow them to enter those fields," he said.
"We provide the educational opportunity so people can have the opportunities to do what they want."
Simon said even as the traditional agriculture student has been in steady decline, MSU still remains a place for a socially or economically disadvantaged student to get a first-rate education.
"There are certain values with land grant - this enormous engagement with society and the push to have relevant research that works at problems of communities, urban and rural," she said.
"The modern day land grant is that people go back and put together revitalization plan for Michigan communities, the same as it was 80 years ago."
Land grant in 1855
In its inception in 1855, the Agriculture College of the State of Michigan was a new land grant for students born without the silver spoon.
Widder, who wrote "Michigan Agriculture College: The Evolution of a Land-Grant Philosophy 1855-1925," said unlike other universities of the time, MSU began with the philosophy that education was not going to be rooted in the classical languages.
"Creating a system where students did not need to know Greek or Latin opened the gates for a lot more people," he said.
He said MSU embodied an inclusive ideal when it was chartered, with a notion that college was not just for the elites anymore.
"The development of the land grant created a system of higher education for the industrial classes," he said. "In the context of the 1860s, we're talking about folks from farms and rural backgrounds."
Simon said MSU's goal at that time was to provide a top-tier education to ordinary people.
The first MSU students with rural backgrounds left college and oftentimes passed what they learned on to those in their home communities through what came to be called "extension programs."
She said MSU's endurance through today comes from its early academic beginnings that emphasized the liberal arts, while keeping a focus on agriculture.
"Agriculture college wasn't to teach people how to plow and do the work of agriculture, but to teach how to lead agriculture and that required English and the liberal arts," she said. "It wasn't just a bunch of techies, and that was the genius of MSU."
Scott Cendrowski can be reached at cendrow3@msu.edu.
