The University of Nebraska and What Grew Here
Near Lincoln, Nebraska
Nebraska became a state in eighteen sixty-seven. The university was chartered two years later, in eighteen sixty-nine, before the city around it had any real form. The founding was not driven by accumulated prosperity. It was more like an assertion: that this place on the plains intended to produce educated people and that it would build the institution before it built much else.
The Morrill Land Grant Act of eighteen sixty-two had set aside federal land to fund universities focused on agriculture and the mechanic arts. Nebraska used that endowment, and from the beginning the university's work was tied to the practical problems of the surrounding land. How do you grow wheat in a dry-summer climate? How do you manage insects? How do you store grain? The university developed answers, tested them, and sent extension agents out to the farms.
The Cornhuskers nickname came from football. The teams were called the Bugeaters and then the Rattlesnake Boys and then a series of names that did not stick until eighteen ninety-nine and nineteen hundred, when the name Cornhuskers began appearing in print. By nineteen oh seven the university yearbook was called The Cornhusker, which suggests the name had already become inseparable from the institution.
What the university built over the following century and a quarter was something that shaped the city around it. Roughly twenty-four thousand students are enrolled in an average year. Many of them stay. The research programs in agriculture, law, and engineering have pulled industries and institutions to Lincoln that would not otherwise be there. The law school that Roscoe Pound once led produced a jurisprudential tradition that traveled east. The agricultural research station attached to the university has influenced how farming is practiced across the Great Plains.
The campus sits embedded in the city. There is no wall between the university and Lincoln; the streets flow through. The distinction between town and gown was never very sharp here, which makes sense given that the university arrived before the town was much of anything.
