The mission of the land-grant (LG) system of higher education in the U.S. has long driven the work of LG colleges and universities. This mission, however, was drafted during a time of widely different social contexts, financial and intellectual resources, and national priorities (1865). With an increase in the number of LG colleges and institutions overtime (1865, 1890, 1994), a shift in focus from agriculture to industry, and changes from a not-for-profit fiduciary and public interest model that once funded the LG system to a commercial model, the LG mission has evolved. Like other “public” universities, LGs are now organized within a commercial model that focuses largely outward with a goal toward expanding US national interests abroad (e.g., World-grant institutions). This model shifts the priority from work aligned to the public mission to efforts guided by revenue generation. In turn, the current LG model:

• Renders unnecessary relational connections with communities

• Prioritizes and commercializes a unidirectional diffusion of knowledge

• Marginalizes local and global economies concerned with social, environmental, and economic resilience.

Abandoning the commercialized model of higher education, however, will not solve the problems associated with commercialization and the limits of growth and change given the ongoing centrality of capitalism as the primarily economic system in which higher education functions. Accordingly, LGs need to change their internal practices, motivations, and value-added systems to consider how commercialized models may better align with an LG mission in need of evolution. This mission — which equally values teaching, research, and outreach — has seen minimal change overtime, with its outputs frequently led by “expert knowledge” flowing outward from institution to community.

Still, we do not advocate the development of new commercialized business models for LG institutions based on structural variables such as standardization, centralization, and specialization. Rather, the unique structures of LG institutions (i.e., public-serving, decentralization, divisiveness) should remain constant. We propose that LGs evolve their public missions by adopting a form of engagement we term radical reciprocity. For us, radical reciprocity refers to a shift in the unidirectional flow of knowledge to ensure that communities serve as experts and co-producers of knowledge both inside and outside LG institutions. Moreover, we intentionally employ the term radical, “or forming the root,” which allows us to get to the systemic roots of oppressive and exclusionary practices. Doing so will allow the pluriversal incorporation of multiple knowledge models or “worlds” within the LG mission, including the commercial, the community, the public and many others.

Land-grant Roots and Relevance

Land-grant universities include some of the largest and most research-productive institutions of higher learning in the world. They have educated millions of students and produced leaders in every field. They have driven research breakthroughs that have saved lives and changed the way we live them. They have connected with and served communities in their states and far beyond.

Michigan State is recognized as the model from which this transformation of U.S. higher education arose. The college’s first president, Joseph Williams, dubbed it “an experiment” that was “established on no precedent, it is alike a pioneer in the march of men and the march of the mind.” Michigan State has often recounted its origin story and celebrated the great good arising from the democratization of higher education, the advancement of knowledge and extension and outreach activities. 

Today, we recognize we have not collectively acknowledged the connection between land-grant universities and the systematic seizure and dispossession of land from Native Americans as well as the role the federal government’s support for agriculture played in relentless westward expansion. Acknowledging this history, we also understand that in our current context, using “pioneer” as a descriptor for our institution does not align with our values of respect and our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

To honor these commitments requires us to tell a more complex story. The land Michigan State occupies was ceded by Indigenous people in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw. These lands are the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi peoples. Land granted to benefit Michigan State in association with the Morrill Act was situated in both the Upper and Lower Peninsulas of Michigan, ceded in the 1819 treaty and two treaties in 1836. Treaties like these were negotiated under duress and were often the result of coercion and violence. 

The impact on Indigenous peoples created by Michigan State’s founding was not only indirect. A map from MSU’s first year shows a Native encampment by the Red Cedar River near Old College Field. This camp appears to have been used seasonally and provided a base for hunting, fishing and processing maple sap. It is not known when Native peoples stopped using the encampment, but it was certainly in the very early years of the university’s existence. Loss of land, diminished access to natural resources and forcible relocation adversely affected Indigenous people’s well-being and cultures in significant ways that still reverberate today.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Decolonization of the LG

How universities say they should engage with communities and the expectations of communities with whom universities engage have changed profoundly in the past 25 years (Hanover Research, 2018). Community engagement, development, justice and change have taken decidedly local, participatory and systemic turns. (Randazzo, 2016, 2020; Tandon, 2014; Saltmarsh & Harley, 2011; Stoecker, 2016) Networks and organizations led by scholars focused on community-participatory research, teaching and learning and other networks, including the American Association of Colleges and Universities, the Engaged Scholarship Consortium, the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement, Imagining America, and many others, have grown tremendously during those 25 years. These organizations have led movements for increased community participation, local inclusion and a focus on systems change within higher education.

At the same time, the need for measurable change in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) inside and outside the academy is now correctly understood as urgent. Twenty-five years ago, universities hadn’t been challenged to respond to systemic racism, Black Lives Matter, #Me Too, 99%, and many other movements for system change in communities across the U.S. and around the world. Universities had not really faced rising extremism, anti-immigrant rhetoric, the legacy of Larry Nassar, and other examples of inequity, implicit bias and white supremacy embedded within the academy. Twenty-five years ago (and some would argue still), universities had not fully reckoned with the interlinked nature of climate change, accelerating inequality and threats to human security and peace. Twenty-five years ago, universities focused largely on celebrating diversity and inclusion – inviting a diversity of people to enjoy what Charles Eisenstein (2020) calls a “banquet of whiteness” without addressing the inequities embedded in what is served, who decides the menu and the seating arrangements.

Eisenstein argues, along with development scholars such as Arturo Escobar (2018), that universities and other institutions need a complete, pluriversal rearrangement of the table itself. We need many different communities to fit at the table, selecting the food, enjoy its flavor and learning from one other. In other words, inclusion must be understood in the context of unearned white privilege and white supremacy as root causes of inequity, injustice, disenfranchisement, and marginalization in the university and across many U.S. institutions. John Muir College Provost K. Wayne Yang (2017), writing under the pseudonym la paperson, calls for the university, in the face of such systemic and ongoing discrimination, rising inequity, the primacy of technological innovation, and the use of social media algorithms and artificial intelligence -- to be decolonialized.

Embedded in these calls for new forms of inclusion and decolonialization, then, is a reorientation that transforms institutional notions of inclusion, in which BIPOC and marginalized communities have long been “included” in elite institutions if they ensure the continuation of the institution’s hierarchy, which in the context of the US can be described as racist, inequitable, and unjust.

Radical Reciprocity

MSU should refocus its land-grant model and practice from an often-elitist form of community engagement to a radical reciprocity that equitably engages with communities—particularly Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC)—as experts and co-producers of knowledge.

By reconciling what it calls the pioneering land-grant mission at Michigan State University – a groundbreaking and necessary transformation of our legacy and that of other land-grant universities during a time of crises and transition – we directly address racist and inequitable structures, which harm the democratic purpose of the university, as well as the communities in which we live, work, and serve. Doing so recenters the land-grant's historical commitment from an often-elitist form of engagement – one that both commodifies and calls for the unidirectional knowledge transfer outward from the university – to a radical reciprocity that equitably engages communities, particularly BIPOC, as experts and co-producers of knowledge. We intentionally employ the term radical in its etymological relationship to “forming the root,” as well as its relationship to a systematic and revolutionary shift. Radical means getting to the root causes of current oppressive and exclusionary practices while simultaneously excavating past practices and tracing their legacies to uproot them. This call for a new and liberated land grant is deeply rooted in new models of university-community relationships.

MSU should not simply seek out and include historically marginalized communities and their knowledges but serve as a college that fits many worlds into one. Therefore, we call on the university and all public serving institutions to adopt a multidirectional and intergenerational relationship model that focuses on power-sharing and a mutual understanding that all knowledge and lived experiences should be included and understood of having equal value.