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Historical writings about the Morrill Land-Grant Acts are not free from promoting unbiased, dominant ideas about the laws’ reach and intentions. For example, at a talk to the Illinois State Historical Society in 1961, historian Donald R. Brown (1962) stated,“The Morrill Act undoubtedly is the most important piece of educational legislation ever passed in the United States: its passage was public recognition that every citizen is entitled to educational aid from the federal government and that common affairs of life are subjects worthy of collegiate training”(374). Such elaborate statements about the Morrill Act reflect historian Jana Nidiffer’s (1999) concern about perpetuating myths in higher education history. I conceptualize this study in the same spirit as Nidiffer (1999), who calls for educational historians to rethink how they write about access in higher education (326). Quoting President John Kennedy, Nidiffer (1999) warns