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The most amazing fact about government support for American higher education is that it occurred at all. Going back to the colonial era, it is important to recall that the mercantile purpose of a colony sending raw materials or profits back to the mother country made building colleges in a colonial outpost an unusual investment for the British crown, where performance tended to be monitored by import export data.
The raw materials of sugar cane, spices, cotton, indigo, and tobacco as well as the finished products of rum and molasses, not bachelors degrees conferred literally were the coin of the realm. Prisoners, conscript laborers, and slaves not students and faculty were the human capital that most dominated policy discussions about Great Britains imperial economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, one supplicant for royal monies petitioned the court of King William and Queen Mary, pleading that the monarchys support for a college in the New World might help to save souls of infidels as well as colonists. The kings attorney general, whose job was to act as a filter and buffer for numerous requests, responded curtly, Souls! Damn your souls! Raise tobacco!
Fortunately for the history of government supported higher education in America and later, the United states, a few exceptions to the rule of imperial economics and policies existed. The Crown did find some interest in supporting colonial colleges that purported both to save souls and to instill clear thinking. In an unusual reversal of standard practice, the Crown and colonial governors earmarked taxes on tobacco to support building a new college rather than to fill the coffers of the Crown! Similarly, building lucrative roadways and canals was the linchpin of colonial productivity, but the Crown and every one of the New World colonial government dedicated transportation taxes, tolls, bridge fees, and surveying licenses, as well as sales taxes to help found and maintain a college in each colony.
Imperial policies made a college charter in the British Empire, whether at home or abroad, an extremely difficult document to be obtain. However, a royal charter was not merely a license to operate; it was comparable to a marriage in that both parties had serious, perpetual commitments to one another. It meant that the royal and colonial governments had an obligation both to oversee and to fund a college. Consequently, colleges in the American colonies were relatively well supported. One is hard pressed to find another public works project or institution that received as generous support as the colleges. Surviving academic buildings on the historic campuses provide a good example. Usually the college building was the largest public building in a colony. Colleges certainly received far more funding than did elementary schools, public health, or employee benefits of that era.
Another legacy from Englands institutional regulations and laws had evolved by the eighteenth century: government allowances for perpetual endowments. Colleges, as one of the major recipients of endowment gifts from alumni and supporters, gained considerable financial leverage and stability from this policy.
The colonial precedent for strong government support of higher education was modified and almost lost with the formation of the United States. Most Americans feared a centralized national government with the power to tax for special projects. Congress did, however, initiate the practice of awarding each new state a substantial land grant for establishing academies or colleges. In contrast, between 1790 and 1820 numerous proposals, endorsed by prominent leaders, floated the idea of creating and funding a national university. But this never materialized. With the important exception of the federal role is establishing and supporting the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis and the United States Military Academy at West Point, college building and funding fell exclusively under the states domain.
This new nationalism hardly meant lack of interest in higher education by the states. To the contrary, many governors and legislatures granted charters to petitioning groups, especially in the younger states of what was then called the West and the South. In contract to the British approach, however, the new state governments seldom tied substantial or regular funding to their conferral of a college charter. One finds an erratic, uneven record of state support ranging from occasional lottery proceeds to deeding of cheap land to colleges. State governments often played favorites, rewarding one college with a lottery award while another college got the consolation prize of desolate swampland. Such short-run favoritism often had the opposite effect for colleges years later when poorly funded institutions owned real estate that later escalated in value.
If a source of relatively stable government support for higher education in the early nineteenth century existed, it was probably at the local government level. Mayors and city founders along with real estate developers offered inducements of land, buildings, and money to persuade a college to locate in their township. Higher education perhaps set a precedent for the late twentieth century practice of American cities relying on public subsidies and tax breaks to court professional sports teams to their metropolitan area.
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