Land-grant colleges and universities occupy a special place in the landscape of American
higher education. Publicly funded agricultural and technical educational institutions were
first founded in the mid-nineteenth century with the Morrill Act, which established land grants
to support these schools. They include such prominent names as Cornell, Maryland,
Michigan State, MIT, Ohio State, Penn State, Rutgers, Texas A&M, West Virginia University,
Wisconsin, and the University of California—in other words, four dozen of the largest and …

While the authors cite a number of sources that provide historical accounts of land-grant
universities, from their legislative founding to how these institutions have evolved (eg,
Sorber 8c Geiger, 2014), Gavazzi and Gee spend less time defining the covenant from a
historical or legislative perspective and instead borrow from Robert Greenleaf's (2002)
concept of servant leadership to clarify how" a bilateral bond that exists between land-grant
institutions and the communities they were designed to serve"(p. 36) can be used by land …