Established by the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862, America’s land-grant universities have had far-reaching influences on the United States and the world. Service as Mandate, Alan I Marcus’s second edited collection of insightful essays about land-grant universities, explores how these universities have adapted to meet the challenges of the past sixty-five years and how, having done so, they have helped to create the modern world.
 
From their founding, land-grant schools have provided educational opportunities to millions, producing many of the nation’s scientific, technical, and agricultural leaders and spawning countless technological and agricultural innovations. Nevertheless, their history has not always been smooth or without controversy or setbacks. These vital centers of learning and research have in fact been redefined and reconceptualized many times and today bear only a cursory resemblance to their original incarnations.
 
The thirteen essays in this collection explore such themes as the emphasis on food science and home economics, the country life movement, the evolution of a public research system, the rise of aerospace engineering, the effects of the GI Bill, the teaching of military science, the sustainable agriculture movement, and the development of golf-turf science. Woven together, these expertly curated scenes, vignettes, and episodes powerfully illustrate these institutions’ ability to flex and adapt to serve the educational needs of an ever-changing American citizenry.
 
By dint of their mission to remedy social, economic, and technical problems; to improve standards of living; and to enhance the quality of life, land-grant universities are destined and intended to be agents of change—a role that finds them at times both celebrated and hotly contested, even vilified. A readable and fascinating exploration of land-grant universities, Service as Mandate offers a vital exploration of these dynamic institutions to educators, policy makers, students, and the wider communities that land-grant universities serve.

What happens when the allegedly value-free social sciences enter the national political arena?  In The Social Sciences Go to Washington, scholars examine the effects of the massive influx of sociologists, demographers, economists, educators, and others to the federal advisory process in the postwar period. Essays look at how these social scientists sought to change existing policies in welfare, public health, urban policy, national defense, environmental policy, and science and technology policy, and the ways they tried to influence future policies.

Policymakers have been troubled that followers of postmodernism have questioned the legitimacy of scientific and political authority to speak for the desires of social groups. As the social sciences increasingly become expressions of individual preferences, the contributors ask, how can they continue to be used to set public policy for us all? 

This collection is a useful resource for anyone studying the relationship between science and the government in the postwar years.

Addresses the relationships between what modern-day experts say to each other and to their constituencies

Technical Knowledge in American Culture addresses the relationships between what modern-day experts say to each other and to their constituencies and whether what they say and do relates to the larger culture, society, and era. These essays challenge the social impact model by looking at science, technology, and medicine not as social activities but as intellectual activities.