Curated playlist
Land-grant universities and colleges
- Cornell UniversityCornell University opened its doors on the 7th of October, 1868, with 412 male students walking onto a hillside farm in Ithaca, New York. The land had been donated by the man whose name the institution bore: Ezra Cornell, a self-made…
- University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley opened its doors in Oakland in 1869 with ten faculty members and forty male students. The land it was built on, the name above its gate, and the very idea of what a public university could become were…
- Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chartered on the 10th of April 1861, and two days later the first battle of the Civil War broke out. The new school had no campus yet, only a charter signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor…
- Rutgers UniversityOn the 10th of November 1766, a royal charter signed by William Franklin established Queen's College in New Jersey. The document named the institution after Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and created both a college and a…
- Michigan State UniversityMichigan State University opened its doors on the 13th of May 1857, with three buildings, five faculty members, and 63 male students. That number is almost comically small for what would become one of America's largest universities, with…
- University of KentuckyThe University of Kentucky opened its doors in 1866 with 190 students and 10 professors, on a campus borrowed from the estate of Henry Clay. That first class arrived not to a grand institution but to a repurposed fairground in Lexington, a…
- University of TennesseeThe University of Tennessee was founded on the 10th of September, 1794, two full years before Tennessee itself became the 16th state of the Union. That timing is remarkable. The institution that would grow into a flagship research…
- Purdue UniversityPurdue University sits on the western bank of the Wabash River in West Lafayette, Indiana, and it has sent more people to space than almost any institution on Earth. Twenty-seven of its graduates have become astronauts. Neil Armstrong, who…
- University of California, IrvineThe University of California, Irvine is a public research university built on land that used to be agricultural ranchland in Orange County. On the 20th of June 1964, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson stood before a crowd of 15,000 people to…
- Morrill Land-Grant ActsThe Morrill Land-Grant Acts trace back to 1796. That year, President George Washington used an address to Congress to call for public support of agricultural education. Nearly seven decades passed before that idea became federal law. The…
- Oklahoma State UniversityOklahoma State University began with a date that most people would never associate with the founding of a university: Christmas Day, 1890. On that day, the Oklahoma Territorial Legislature approved the creation of the Oklahoma Territorial…