Justin Morrill, Land Grant Colleges, and, Oh Yes, Writing: A Rant

Justin Morrill

by Libby Sternberg

When I lived in Vermont, I provided occasional commentary for Vermont Public Radio. As part of that gig, I ended up delivering a three-minute piece on Justin Morrill during a series about Vermont contributions to the country and the world.

Morrill was a Vermont Representative and Senator who introduced legislation in the mid-1800s establishing and funding colleges that combined "liberal and practical" education. "Land grant" colleges wouldn't just be devoted to studying theory. They'd combine classic liberal education with practical instruction in agriculture and "the mechanic arts."

Today, all states have institutions that originated as land-grant colleges. They range from Rutgers in New Jersey to the University of California and include anything with an "A&M" after the name. Most are public, but two elite private institutions got their starts as recipients of land-grants -- Cornell and MIT.

Okay, what does this have to do with writing? I'm getting there.

Morrill might not have realized it, but he was starting a quiet revolution with his land-grant idea. Land grant colleges eventually became the model for virtually all American colleges and universities, combining practical with theoretical, shaking off a stuffy, elitist approach to higher learning and opening it up to people who wanted to do as well as think. What a quintessential American idea!

This doing-and-thinking approach plays out across the curriculum of most colleges, with students availing themselves of highly practical majors--everything from hotel management to engineering--while still studying the humanities. Even majors that might not be considered practical (well, to parents, at least) often include some useful component -- internships and research projects that push students to think about how to use their humanities background to earn a living.

And then there's writing...

You knew I'd get to it eventually.

I wasn't an English or writing major myself. No, I studied the highly practical field of voice performance at a music conservatory. But I've had numerous occasions to encounter writing students and programs over the past several years. And here's what my window on that world has led me to believe:

While the history professor might be helping her students learn history and learn how to apply that knowledge to future aspirations (whether they lead to becoming a historian or a lawyer), writing programs--their fiction components, at least--seem to focus almost entirely on what I will call Academic Fiction. That is, prose and poetry that is celebrated, talked about, discussed and enjoyed almost exclusively by other academics.

That's fine. There's a place for that. Huzzah for those who are successful in that field!

Literary fiction that is also commercial

But there's a world of fiction beyond the edge of the campus, and most of it is found in bookstores and on e-shelves. It's called commercial fiction. Yes, it can include literary fiction. But it also includes genre fiction--romance, mystery, sci-fi, horror, young adult, historical.

I've come across outright disdain for some of these genres among some academics. (Uh, like the professor who sneered that writing historicals was cheating because the sepia tones that permeate the work make it too easy to....well, whatever. I don't even remember the rest of it.)

But generally, there's a sort of cluelessness about commercial fiction. How many college writing workshops and series don't feature a single commercial artist?

Let me pause here to celebrate two local colleges where writing profs did see the value of introducing their students to commercial fiction. Millersville University and Elizabethtown College professors both invited yours truly to talk to writing students on their campuses, and I wasn't talking about Academic Fiction.

Those two colleges and their writing professors, sadly, are often the exception and not the rule.

So, while today's music major might graduate with an understanding of music theory and some practical knowledge of the music world--how to audition, what the market is, how to get gigs--many writing/literature students graduate appreciating and admiring Academic Fiction but with no clue as to how to get an agent, what a book contract should look like, what editors in New York are looking for, what small presses are respected and which ones don't show up on anyone's radar screen, how to get reviewed, how to promote your books (which, yes, often falls to the author).

It bugs me that commercial fiction has somehow been excluded from the gated community we know as the Ivory Tower. As I've pointed out on these pages before, it bugs people like Stephen King, too, who said (it bears repeating) in his acceptance of the National Book Award:

"I have (no) patience with or use for those who make a point of pride in saying they've never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular writer.

"What do you think? You get social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture? Never in life, as Capt. Lucky Jack Aubrey would say. And if your only point of reference for Jack Aubrey is the Australian actor, Russell Crowe, shame on you..."

As I said before, bravo to those who succeed in the world of Academic Fiction. But even if that's the world of letters that lights the fire in the belly of writing instructors, they shouldn't cut their students off from the rest of the writing world. Those students might not be interested in feeding their writer's soul by penning tomes they read aloud to college students as part of a writing series. They might be more interested in making enough money at writing to literally feed themselves and their families. They might want to take the theoretical and combine it with the practical, just as Senator Morrill envisioned with his land-grant college idea a century and a half ago.

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Libby Sternberg is an Edgar-nominated author of a bunch of books ranging from young adult to historical to humorous women's fiction. She also writes under the name Libby Malin. She is Editor-in-Chief of Istoria Books.

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