A0100:1

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY

Institutional Research

The Heritage

WSU is one of the land-grant colleges established under the Morrill Act of 1862. This act provided grants of land to each state for a college providing education in agricultural and mechanical arts but also in the liberal arts-training for a profession and education for a lifetime. Other legislative landmarks for WSU's development were the Hatch Act of 1887 and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914. The Hatch Act provided for experiment stations at the land grant colleges to add to scientific knowledge. The Smith Lever Act charged the land grant institutions with taking the results of scholarship and discovery directly to the people. Through its research and extension programs WSU has had a significant influence on the state's people and economy. The endowing Morrill Act did not prescribe a curriculum; it brought together liberal and practical education which had been historically separate and class-specific. It thereby opened higher education to groups that had been virtually excluded from it,without confining them to educational programs designed merely to prepare them for productive employment. In a quiet way, the Morrill Act was a revolutionary document, aimed at greatly enhancing equality of opportunity.

The founders of Washington State University accepted the broad vision of the Morrill Act. In the documents by which the new institution was created, the state legislature too avoided narrow efinitions of mission. The institution, founded in 1890 on the hills of the Palouse, was called the Washington State Agricultural College and School of Science, but within a very few years it had become the State College of Washington, without restriction to science, agriculture, or technology. The State College of Washington became Washington State University in 1959. WSU's early president, Enoch A. Bryan, told students in 1894 that practical skills and empirical knowledge were not enough; they needed a broad understanding of the world if they were to be leaders in it.

Throughout it's history, then, WSU has been a research institution of higher learning encompassing the liberal arts and professional education, basic and applied research, and extended education and public service.

Source: Provost's Office

File: DB_A0100.WK4

Contact: MRW Rev. 10/94