Issue link: http://digital.corporatepress.com/i/416289
18 | november/december 2014 | Facilities Manager And they did come. The settlers wanted a university. "Settlers wanted a place to go to learn to be better farmers, so they could manage their communities better, so they could read Shake- speare, so they could be civilized," Suri said. Reflecting the community component of the frontier experi- ence, these frontier institutions were residential, unlike the European model. The buildings recreated a frontier mentality. "The idea of an American university is that you were not creat- ing gentlemen; you were creating pioneering citizens," Suri said, bringing people from diverse backgrounds together into a com- munity to discuss important matters, working together to make their way forward. This residential component also meant that the physical place and identification with that place mattered from the start. How did these institutions come about? As the new repub- lic grew, two facts worked together. First, there was state and federal—and popular—support for public higher education, and second, both state and federal governments had more land than money and thus could supply one but not the other. The country had—and still has—a plenitude of land. As early as 1785, the Georgia state assembly created the land-grant model: It allocated 40,000 acres to build the nation's first public uni- versity. The land was not to be built on; rather it was to be sold, and the money from the sale endowed the university. That is, it paid for the property and buildings. Other states followed suit. The federal government adopted the model when, in the midst of the Civil War, President Lincoln signed the Land Grant College Act of 1862, known as the Morrill Act, a landmark of enlightened legislation, which granted 30,000 acres of federal land to every state, to be sold to endow a university. TRANSFORMATION: THE GI BILL AND BEYOND "Universities were for productive gain and intellectual ad- vancement," Suri said. "If you want to understand our pros- perity, it's because universities have opened their doors in our society to more people than any other society." And it was the federal government's commitment, in another piece of land- mark legislation, that made this opening of doors possible on an unprecedented scale. In the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (the G.I. Bill), the federal government committed to pro- vide every veteran with a college education if they wished. This bill and its iterations over the years transformed universities and transformed the country. The growing campus in the late 1800s. Left, University of Wisconsin Madison, below, University of Texas Austin.