the Winter Olympics officials spotted me and managed to stop me before I got to the ski jump.
Unlike Eddie the Eagle and Eric the Eel.
Not sure where this fits: Philosophy, maybe? “I don’t think I could eat more than three dozen donuts.”
Although it did fit Dirac’s original conception of occupied negative energy states, “antimatter” has an unfortunate connotation implying negative mass and energy, reversed inertia and so forth that antimatter doesn’t actually have.
This school was here before you came, and it’ll be here before you go!
— Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff, Horsefeathers
That reminds me of the fact that the University of Minnesota was established as a land grant college when Minnesota was still a territory; so the U retains a small but real degree of autonomy from the state government.
Does everyone know what that means? I’ve heard it a couple of times in my life, but been confused every time…
Land grant colleges were established and funded according to the terms of the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862. Basically, the nascent Republican Party, thanks to its vestiges of Whiggism, wanted to promote agriculture and industry in the various states, and the federal government held title to immense acreage of lands in the Western U.S. The Act allowed the states to take title to federal lands in their states (and if the acreage was not sufficient, title to other lands in the West) and sell that land to provde an endowment for colleges that would teach (and research) topics related to agriculture, engineering, and similar technical fields, rather than the prevailing course of study at colleges of the time which tended to be focused on liberal arts, classical studies, and theology.
ETA: The amount of land allocated to each state was proportional to its representation in the electoral college, basically.
Ninja’ed. Well, here’s the Wikipedia article.
There were several acts over a long period of time. Lots of big state schools are land grant. One surprise: MIT.
Long ago I thought the federal land grant was for the land to put the school on. But it was just a transference of federal land to states to sell and use that money to fund schools.
Probably a bigger surprise is that Rutgers and Cornell are also land grant schools.
I don’t understand. Why would that be a surprise?
The stereotype of a land grant college is that it focuses on agricultural studies, is located in the midwest, and is not a prestige school - and Cornell and Rutgers don’t fit that bill.
That’s a bigger surprise than MIT? I think i learned about the existence of land grant schools from Cornell.
If they didn’t know already, most people would probably be surprised an Ivy League school is a cow college.
MIT didn’t have a football team when the Ivy League was formed. So it’s not technically in the ivy League. But MIT and Stanford (also not Ivy League) are more prestigious than many of the schools in the Ivy League, including Cornell, IMHO.
some details from Wikipedia
The initial MIT football team, nicknamed the Techmen, recorded its first victory by defeating Exeter College, 2–0, in 1881.[2] In 1901, the MIT student body voted 119–117 to discontinue the intercollegiate football squad. The university did continue to field sophomore and freshman football teams into the 1920s. The last game played against another university was the MIT sophomore team against the Harvard freshman team in 1901.[3]
Cornell, at least, still has a large agricultural college. I think Rutgers may also, though am not sure.
ETA: There’s a Rutgers tomato, which was originally bred there.