ghmerrill wrote:Nothing explicit or implied about the goal being to "develop new technology" that I can see. Nothing about "research".
You use of the term "deviant" is not designed to foster friendly debate.
The Morrill Act of 1862 that funded the first round of land-grant colleges was indeed aimed at teaching. But it did not take long to realize that they had to have something to teach that was worth the students going to college to learn and to advance the state of the art. So, they started doing research. This started with private and state funding but was eventually funded at the federal level, and specifically attached to the land-grant colleges, by the Hatch Act of 1887. That act funded agricultural experiment stations specifically targeted at developing new agricultural technologies and methodologies. Most major land-grant colleges established agricultural experiment stations using that funding, and the funding grew with a number of subsequent legislative acts to become greater than the original proceeds from the land grants themselves. Faculty members were expected to work with the researchers in the experiment stations to develop and teach these new technologies and methodologies. And, as the Industrial Revolution proceeded and the country became more industrial than agricultural, the agricultural experiment stations were joined by engineering experiment stations.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, colleges taught liberal arts and science--languages, history, philosophy, the classics, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and so on. They were never aimed at industrial technological pursuits. The Morrill Act's stated purpose was "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life." It was thus aimed at technological pursuits and applications which were seen as lagging in the colleges and universities of the day. This was a whole new application for colleges.
But if you look at the research done prior, it was done by academics, in university situations for the most part. Newton was a fellow of Cambridge (read: professor) during his creative period when he invented calculus and characterized the laws of gravity and motion. Johnson, who wrote the first comprehensive dictionary of English, was at Oxford. Men like these were at such institutions primarily to develop new knowledge and then secondarily to teach it. They got their gigs at these colleges not because of what they knew that others knew, but because of what they knew that was otherwise unknown.
The first secular music school was the Paris Conservatory, founded in 1795. Conservatories then and now have a strong vocational training component. The notion of music as a scholarly pursuit is much more recent, and not really any older than engineering, for that matter.
So, the Oxbridge of Newton and Johnson, which rode on the heels of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, expected faculty to shine light into darkness (the act of which defines research). Even colleges established to provide teaching in vocational pursuits such as engineering, as they were seen 150 years ago, were given a research charge only a few years later. Research has been part of their charge for 125 years, which means that it was part of many land-grant college charters before they were even formed.
One big question is what constitutes research in music. Some of it might be historical, and some of might be philosophical (certainly one of the classical pursuits of academia). But some of it is simply those who usher in new musical forms that achieve significance. That compulsion to be innovative (which is perhaps the research of music though I fight that conflation in engineering) has its downside--it has led to a lot of academic contemporary avant-garde that will languish in well-deserved obscurity hopefully sooner rather than later--but it carries on the role of academia to shine a light into darkness in whatever field is being pursued. That role is not new.
Now to address your comment written after I started this post: If you take service away from teaching and research, you have a university that does not interact with the professions it supports, and it become irrelevant. If you take away the research, pretty soon what is being taught is what the professors learned only from their professors, and the knowledge base becomes inbred. Students learn stuff that has been superseded by new knowledge developed elsewhere. The whole point of academic standards (which are based on research) is to prevent exactly that. If you remove the teaching from research and service, you develop new knowledge and interact with the society of its practitioners, but you do not pass along that new knowledge. Those three elements are all necessary for universities to sustain relevance.
Rick "thinking the teaching versus research debate is a bit like the musicality versus technique debate--the correct answer is yes" Denney
