From the top down, you’ve heard it a million times. Some argue it’s the president’s favorite phrase.

“To be the best land-grant university in the land,” is the goal against which administrators are banking they can raise millions, the goal against which Iowa State President Martin Jischke has rooted his term of office.

The goal was adopted by the state Board of Regents shortly before Jischke came to ISU in 1991. Jischke embraced the concept after taking office.

“I thought it was a wonderful goal,” he said. “I think the ideas that underline a land-grant university are very powerful and quite appropriate for this day and age.”

Students seem to understand a desire to be “the best.” But the best “land-grant” university? Sounds good, but still there’s a lingering question for many — possibly most — past, present and even future Cyclones: What exactly is a land-grant university?

That’s a matter of history, a matter marked on this campus by an ailing building.

Morrill Hall, located next to the Hub, was named in honor of Justin Morrill, a senator from Vermont who valued equality of education so much that he sponsored a bill that set aside federal land for land-grant universities.

“He was a great proponent of fairness,” said Alan Marcus, a professor of history. “He wanted to level the playing field. He wanted the people who were the backbone of America to have a chance to go to college.”

The Morrill Act was passed in 1862. It intended to set up at least one land-grant university in each state that would give sharp education discounts to farm kids.

That was a product of a very different America in the 1800s.

All 50 states did not exist as such, and the federal government, along with different groups of Native Americans, still claimed much of the nation’s land, even within a sovereign state’s borders.

The set-up is comparable to one aspect of modern America: federal ownership of national parks. Yosemite National Park, for instance, exists within the state borders of Wyoming. But the federal government owns this land and controls how it is used. The state of Wyoming has no jurisdiction within Yosemite.

To help set up these land-grant schools in the 1860s, the federal government agreed to give up some of this land to the states for the express purposes of founding institutions of higher learning.

There are dozens of land-grant universities all over the country, from New York (Cornell University) all the way to California (Berkeley). It was up to each state officials how to incorporate the land-grant idea into their universities.

Some states split the requirements between state schools: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, is a land-grant engineering school, while the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is a land-grant agricultural school.

Both the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois existed before the Morrill Act, but Wisconsin and Illinois state officials made them land-grant universities, thus changing the schools’ focus.

The state of Iowa (and Michigan, too, for that matter) decided to create separate universities as their land-grant schools. Hence, Iowa State was founded in 1869 as a land-grant university.

But the times have definitely changed. A land-grant university today is sharply different than a century ago.

First of all, for the first 20 years or so of their existence, these schools offered free tuition, a practice that ended because of the enormous number of students who wanted to take advantage of the schooling.

In addition, these schools did not specialize in certain areas of study. Iowa State, at the time, was not a science- or engineering-based university as it is today.

“It was not to be an agricultural or technological place necessarily,” Marcus said. “It was to give sons and daughters of farmers and mechanics [a much more liberal term in the 1800s] the same education as the elite, the opportunities that only the well-to-do had.”

In order to “compete” with the expensive private schools and give students the same type of education that the wealthy had, land-grant universities faced a dilemma: Many young people who were eligible to attend, say, Iowa State, did not have the educational background necessary to go to college.

“What schools existed in Iowa in 1870?” Marcus asked. “It’s not clear that there was any common definition of ‘high school.’ There was no common definition of ‘college’ or ‘university,’ and no common definition of how prepared you had to be to go to one.”

So in the academic year of 1868-69, the year before it was founded, Iowa State offered a college preparatory course, Marcus said, so that prospective students would be ready for their college careers once ISU officially opened its doors.

Once that happened, Iowa State offered students a well-rounded education similar to their Ivy League counterparts. Marcus said that professors taught literature, mathematics, science, Greek and Latin.

These land-grant schools also extended their vaults of learning to both men and women.

Ever since the inception of land-grant schools, some state legislators, especially in farming states, wanted to alter the universities’ focus to benefit their constituents and preserve the “American” way of life.

“They were concerned about people leaving the farm,” Marcus said. “There was an idea that putting your hands in the soil and going back to nature was what kept America great and democratic. People who worked with their hands didn’t fall for the aristocratic system of Europe.”

As a result of this desire for change, land-grant universities followed the legislators’ lead. “Somewhere along the line, particularly in the late 19th Century,” Marcus said, “land-grant universities became concerned with solving problems of the agricultural community.”

In addition, various sorts of businesses and industries sought to improve their efficiency, which led to the study of engineering and other sciences. “To Iowa State’s credit, it was a leader in both of these areas,” he said.

Since this shift in the meaning of “land-grant university,” the idea has been further altered. In addition to tuition fees, these schools no longer cater to the children of farmers and mechanics.

“Today, saying that Iowa State is a land-grant university is taken to mean that we are an agriculture, science and engineering school,” Marcus said. “We are, by definition, more practical than [the University of Iowa] is. That’s what it has evolved to mean.”

Despite the changes, John Anderson, interim director of university relations, pointed out that the main ambitions of land-grant institutions remain the same as they were when these schools were founded.

“You do have to go back to their roots, which means reaching out,” Anderson said. “The institutions were created to extend the resources of higher education and serve the people of Iowa.”

Some of these ideals include expanding access to higher education, doing research on the problems of today’s world and extending the resources of the university in order to solve these problems, Anderson said.

These efforts include assistance for farmers, youth programs like 4-H and helping business and industry become more efficient. “It’s part of our mission,” Anderson said.

In a nutshell, today’s view of a land-grant university is using the institution of higher learning to better the community, to bring the education and its benefits to the people of the state.

“The land-grant concept, when you think in modern terms, gives you the opportunity to be more outward with your university,” Anderson said. “Land-grant universities have never been ivory towers, and they never should be.”