The Origins of Federal aid for greater Education revises the normal interpretation of the land-grant collage circulate, whose associations have been introduced into being by way of the 1862 Morrill Act to supply for "the liberal and useful schooling of the economic classes." instead of being the inevitable outcome of the unfolding dynamic of institutional and socioeconomic forces, Williams argues, it was once the lively intervention and initiative of a handful of academic leaders that secured the schools' future—above all, the actions of George W. Atherton.

For approximately 3 many years, Atherton, who was once the 7th president of the Pennsylvania country college, labored to safe constant federal monetary aid for the universities, which of their early years obtained little the help of the states they have been designed to profit. He additionally helped to boost the associations as entire "national" universities grounded within the liberal arts and sciences—a notion that countered the present view of the schools as normally agricultural schools.

Atherton grew to become the best mover within the crusade to enact the 1887 Hatch Act, which inspired the institution of agricultural scan stations at land-grant faculties. The act marked the federal government's first attempt to supply non-stop investment to investigate devices linked to larger schooling associations. on the similar occasions, Atherton performed a key position within the formation of the 1st organization of such associations: The organization of yank Agricultural faculties and scan Stations. It used to be the organization that supplied the severe mass had to foyer Congress successively and to procedure the various possibilities and threats the land-grant faculties confronted throughout the 1885–1906 period.

Atherton was once additionally deeply fascinated by the crusade for the Morrill Act of 1890, which supplied long-sought annual appropriations to land-grant faculties for a wide diversity of educational courses and inspired regular progress in kingdom help in the course of the 1890s.

Roger Williams lines the causes and strategies in the back of a chain of legislation that made the government irreversibly dedicated to investment larger schooling and medical learn and offers wealthy new insights into the complexities, polarities, and inherent contradictions of the heritage of the yank land-grant movement.