Embracing the Land-grant Mission

Editor’s Note: Chancellor Randy Woodson has announced he will retire on June 30, 2025. This article is part of the Celebrating Transformation initiative, a yearlong effort to honor the chancellor’s 14 years of service and to recognize the university’s extraordinary achievements under his leadership. Learn more and join the celebration at https://transformation.ncsu.edu/. 

Chancellor Randy Woodson and his wife, Susan, were sitting in Lynah Rink at a Cornell vs. Harvard hockey game in the late 1970s when he started hearing the typical jeers from visiting Crimson fans, denigrating his new school’s history as New York’s “Cow College.”

Over the next four years, the season-ticket-holder Woodsons, having just graduated from the biggest public school in their home state of Arkansas, were in for a comprehensive education that included as much about academic culture as it did his pursuit of a master’s degree in horticulture and his Ph.D. in horticulture and plant physiology.

At the time, Woodson had never really pondered why classicists from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Pennsylvania and Dartmouth wanted to diminish the agriculturalists in Ithaca, New York.

“I had never really thought about it at all,” says Woodson, whose rural Arkansas roots helped determine his professional pursuits. “I just wanted to study agriculture. For me, Arkansas was the best place to go, mainly because Susan was a year ahead of me, and that’s where she was.”

Slowly through the years, Woodson truly began to absorb and embrace the transformative meaning of a land-grant education, something he brought to NC State when he became the university’s 14th chief executive officer in 2010.

“I don’t think I really appreciated that history until I was in graduate school,” Woodson says. “I know for sure I never studied it. But as I moved into graduate school, and certainly by the time I became a professor, I realized that creating land-grant colleges was critical in the country’s academic evolution and success.” Woodson taught at Louisiana State and Purdue, both land-grant universities. 

Why was it so important? Because at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Germany was at the center of technical and agricultural education.

“We had to be able to compete with countries in Europe,” Woodson says. “At the time, we didn’t have technical universities in America. We were teaching the classics, not agriculture and engineering. If you wanted to be an engineer in 1862, the only place you could go was West Point.

“We realized before the Civil War that to compete, we needed to change the educated workforce.”

Most technical education was done in Germany, and German was the language of science. NC State’s first leader, President Alexander Quarles Holladay, was part of that tradition, having earned his bachelor of arts and law degrees by attending the University of Virginia (1857-59) and the University of Berlin (1859-61).

The U.S. government hoped to change that during the 1800s, but Southern states opposed it. When many of those states seceded in 1861, Congress quickly passed the Morrill Act of 1862, establishing land-grant colleges in each state and providing unsettled land to sell in new territories west of the Mississippi River to raise money for education.

Sharing His Passion in the Classroom

For years, Woodson has accepted an invitation by College of Agriculture and Life Sciences professor of crop sciences Bob Patterson to teach a session on NC State’s land-grant history, a highlight of every semester. He tells the unvarnished story that is rooted in southern aristocracy and academic suppression for the masses.

“The landowners in the South at the time insisted on keeping education for the elite and keeping it focused on theology, religion, law, et cetera,” Woodson said in his lecture last winter. “And so the senators from the South as a bloc voted down the first Morrill Act.

“It was reintroduced in 1861 and signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862. After the war ended, it was extended by President Andrew Johnson to 1866.”

In North Carolina, the grant was quickly accepted, and the money was first used by the University of North Carolina to help reopen after the war and pay off debt. The university did not use it for the stated mission of all land-grant schools: to educate state citizens in agriculture, mechanic arts and military sciences.

So in 1887, influenced by progressive farmers and statewide leaders in the Watauga Club, the General Assembly created the North Carolina School for Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, now known as NC State University. Using the state’s land-grant funds for their intended purpose, the school evolved into the national leader in agricultural research, engineering training and military support it is today. A second land grant in 1890 created North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State College in Greensboro, now the largest of the historically Black universities in the U.S.

Once I got into the administrative role, I didn’t want to be anywhere that wasn’t part of that [land-grant] mission.

Woodson has been proud that his curriculum vitae is packed exclusively with a land-grant history, from his undergraduate days at Arkansas to his graduate and doctoral studies at Cornell to his first faculty positions at Louisiana State and Purdue and his first administrative duties at Purdue.

“I guess I didn’t know or appreciate that our federal government, going back a long way, had incentivized states to adopt an educational philosophy that was different than the one we had long established, by creating a ground-breaking funding mechanism.

“It became clear to me while I was at Cornell, which celebrated its land-grant heritage more than any place I have ever been.”

Going back to his earliest administrative roles at Purdue, where he was a department head, a director and a dean of agricultural programs and provost, Woodson fully adopted the land-grant mission.

“Once I got into the administrative role, I didn’t want to be anywhere that wasn’t part of that mission,” Woodson says.

Not long after he became chancellor at NC State in 2010, Woodson was elected as the chair of the board of the American Public Land-grant Universities, serving a one-year term during a critical time in the organization’s history.

When he leaves NC State by the end of June 2025, Woodson will not only have strengthened NC State’s dedication to that mission but also will have expanded it through leadership that was grounded in land-grant history and a devotion to creating advanced educational opportunities for students from North Carolina and beyond.