Colorado State University: The Land-Grant on the Front Range

The campus spreading across northern Fort Collins was built on a legal framework Abraham Lincoln signed into law in eighteen sixty-two, a year into the Civil War. The Morrill Land-Grant Act donated federal land to each state and territory, directing that the proceeds fund colleges focused on agriculture, engineering, and the military arts. When Territorial Governor Edward McCook signed the bill establishing Colorado's land-grant college in eighteen seventy, Fort Collins was little more than an abandoned Army post and a cluster of settlers. The Colorado Agricultural College opened its doors nine years later, in eighteen seventy-nine, with a donated two-hundred-and-forty-acre campus and a mandate to make practical knowledge accessible to people who could not afford the private universities of the East.

The institution grew through several name changes into Colorado State University, and today enrolls roughly thirty-five thousand students from all fifty states and a hundred and fifty countries. It remains the state's only land-grant institution.

Two research programs in particular have made the university a national presence. The College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, established in nineteen oh seven, ranks consistently among the top veterinary programs in the country. Temple Grandin, the livestock behavior scientist whose humane handling systems are now used in roughly half of all United States beef processing facilities, has been on the faculty since nineteen ninety. She transformed an entire industry.

The Department of Atmospheric Science, which traces its formal origins to the nineteen sixties, was ranked first in the country in several categories by the National Research Council in two thousand ten. The department has launched two research satellites with NASA, operates advanced cloud-modeling systems, and has produced faculty at universities across the country and abroad. The mountain weather that rolls over the Rockies visible from this campus is, in many respects, the lab.

The university's mascot is the Ram, and its football program plays in Canvas Stadium, opened in two thousand seventeen, which sits on the eastern edge of the campus within sight of the foothills.