Title: Creating a Fourth Branch of State Government: The University of California and the Constitutional Convention of 1879
Abstract: The state constitutional convention of 1879 significantly changed the status of California's land-grant university. Throughout the 1870s, farmers and labor groups accused the university's Board of Regents with mismanagement of federal land grants, corruption, and a failure to establish agriculture, mining, and mechanical arts programs as outlined in the federal Morrill Act and statutory provisions within the state's 1868 Organic Act. During a tumultuous decade in California history, many saw the new University of California as serving the interests of the upper classes, focusing on classical gentlemanly and replicating the Yankee private institutions of the East. The detractors of the university demanded that, as an instrument of social and economic development, the university primarily serve the training and research needs of agriculture and industry, the stated leading objective of the institution under statutory law. Here was California's version of a national debate regarding the purpose and curriculum of higher education, influenced by the state's particular political culture, economy, and institutions. The solution proposed and pursued by the State Grange and the Workingmen's party within the halls of the capital was to abolish the regents, form a new board with largely farming and labor representatives, and limit university programs strictly to those concerned with agriculture, mining, and mechanical arts. The Grange's 1874 proposal failed to generate sufficient support within the legislature; but by the late 1870s a new opportunity arose for university reform. California's rapidly growing population, escalating
Publication Year: 1992
Publication Date: 1992-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 6
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