“Everyone,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously s said, “is entitled to his own opinion.”

“But, he added, “they are not entitled to their own facts.”

Moynihan’s words are particularly appropriate in the current fraught moment when, in my opinion, the current President of the United States and his supporters refuse to acknowledge basic facts about the horrific pandemic and the results of a well-run election. Moreover, for good measure, the Republican Senator-elect from Alabama apparently can’t correctly identify the three branches of our national government and mistakenly claimed World War II was a battle against socialism.
All of this came to mind when I began thinking about today’s #stampoftheday, a 4-cents stamp issued on November 14, 1962 celebrating “Higher Education” – specifically the 100th anniversary of the Morrill Act, which created land-grant universities in the United States.

A brainchild of Senator Justin Smith Morrill, who represented Vermont in the US House and then the Senate, the Morrill Act fundamentally changed American higher education, which, until that time, was primarily for elites and focused on studying classics and theology. Morrill, and other reformers, were trying to create a system that also would provide accessible and practical. In particular, they wanted to create schools that would teach agriculture, engineering, military tactics, and the sciences, as well as the classical curriculum that had heretofore defined American higher education.

To fund these public colleges, Morrill proposed land grants. Specifically, the federal government would set aside sizeable amounts of federally-owned land-up to 30,000 acres in each state. The government would sell then land and the proceeds would be used to fund “the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college” in each state. These could be new or existing public or private schools.

The idea, which was similar to how the federal government funded railroads, was fiercely criticized as federal overreach, particularly by leaders of slaveholding states. Senator Clement Clay of Alabama, for example, called Morrill’s efforts “one of the most monstrous, iniquitous and dangerous measures which have ever been submitted to Congress.” Such opposition stymied Morrill’s efforts until 1862, when the southern states had seceded from the union.

In total, 57 colleges and universities were funded by the act, including Auburn University (where Alabama Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville coached football). A second Morrill Act, passed in 1890, was aimed at the reconstituted Southern states, and included provisions that eventually led to the funding (not via land grants) of 19 “historically black colleges and universities” (HBCUs).
We should acknowledge that the land grants that funded these notable universities required removing Native Americans from land sold to white settlers (and many schools are grappling with this complex legacy). But we also should also recognize that the law and these schools made the US a world leader in technical education. Moreover, we should honor the powerful idea behind the land-grant schools – one that is as timely today as it was during the Civil War and one that is near and dear to my heart.

I’ve had an odd career. I started as a local journalist, went back to school to learn more about the issues I was covering and stumbled into a series of jobs at Harvard (which is not a land-grant institution) that all have involved efforts to better connect the worlds of scholarship and the worlds of governance, particularly at the state and local level. I believe that practitioners and policymakers can benefit from insights generated by scholars and students. And I believe that those who study public policy and administration have much to learn from the practitioners in the public, non-profit and for-profit sectors working on a variety of key issues.

This mutual learning requires a willingness to listen and to learn, including an agreement to collect, review, and hopefully use data even if (and perhaps especially when) the data is odds with ideology and assumptions. However, in the end, the data usually don’t tell policymakers what to do. Rather, they provide plausible courses of action and the different values and priorities that each would advance or constrain – in short the decisions that policymakers have to make.

As Moynihan said, each of us in entitled to our own opinion. And those opinions can and do influence policymaking. But they should not be based on “alternative facts.” Because right now, in the midst of a rapidly-worsening pandemic and growing political conflict, everyone is not entitled to their own facts.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice (and facts), and work for peace.