Capital of Mind: The Idea of a Modern American University

By Adam R. Nelson

The second volume of an ambitious new economic history of American higher education.

Capital of Mind is the second volume in a breathtakingly ambitious new economic history of American higher education. Picking up from the first volume, Exchange of Ideas, Adam R. Nelson looks at the early decades of the nineteenth century, explaining how the idea of the modern university arose from a set of institutional and ideological reforms designed to foster the mass production and mass consumption of knowledge. This “industrialization of ideas” mirrored the industrialization of the American economy and catered to the demands of a new industrial middle class for practical and professional education. From Harvard in the north to the University of Virginia in the south, new experiments with the idea of a university elicited intense debate about the role of scholarship in national development and international competition, and whether higher education should be supported by public funds, especially in periods of fiscal austerity. The history of capitalism and the history of the university, Nelson reveals, are intimately intertwined—which raises a host of important questions that remain salient today. How do we understand knowledge and education as commercial goods? Should they be public or private? Who should pay for them? And, fundamentally, what is the optimal system of higher education for a capitalist democracy?

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jan 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9780226829210

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Cover Page for Capital of Mind

Capital of Mind

Capital of Mind

The Idea of a Modern American University

*

Adam R. Nelson

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2024 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2024

Printed in the United States of America

33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82920-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82921-0 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226829210.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nelson, Adam R., author.

Title: Capital of mind : the idea of a modern American university / Adam R. Nelson.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023010341 | ISBN 9780226829203 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226829210 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Universities and colleges—United States—History—19th century. | Education, Higher—United States—History—19th century. | Education, Higher—Economic aspects—United States—History—19th century. | Capitalism and education—United States. | Capitalism—Social aspects—United States—History—19th century. | United States—Intellectual life—19th century.

Classification: LCC LC67.62 .N457 2024 | DDC 378.7309/034—dc23/eng/20230313

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023010341

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Jay

Knowledge is a capital that does not waste. Neither moth nor rust corrupts it. It brightens in the using.

Theodore Sedgwick, 1823

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part I: The Idea of a University, 1812–18

Charlottesville

1 · A Plan of a University in Virginia

2 · The Literary Fund

Cambridge (via Göttingen)

3 · Our Young Geniuses in Boston

4 · The State of Literature in Germany

Consolidation

5 · Every Science Deemed Useful

6 · No One Will Buy What No One Has Offered to Sell

Part II: The Economy of Knowledge, 1818–24

Crises

7 · The Late Riot at Göttingen

8 · The Inadequacy of the Funds for the University

Controversies . . . and Curricula

9 · A Professor of Political Economy

10 · The Science of Wealth

Competition!

11 · If We Can Ever Have a University at Cambridge

12 · Intellectual Economy

Part III: The Industrialization of Ideas, 1824–30

Cosmopolitanism/Commercialism

13 · To Improve Our Science, as We Have Done Our Manufactures, by Borrowed Skill

14 · Filled by Foreigners

Conflict

15 · Modern Views of Liberal Education

16 · Friedrich List

Catalyst

17 · Intellectual Power

18 · An Honorable Competition with the Universities of Europe

Conclusion

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliographic Essay

Index

Preface

American universities dominate global higher education. Just look at the annual rankings! In 2021, the ever-popular list of Best Global Universities from US News and World Report put American universities in fifteen of its first twenty slots (the others were in the United Kingdom). In the World University Rankings from Times Higher Education, American universities grabbed fourteen of the first twenty spots (the others were in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Canada, and China), and in the Academic Ranking of World Universities from Shanghai Ranking, American universities again seized fifteen of the first twenty places (thanks to a unique methodology, the others went to lucky winners in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and France). If universities are, in fact, comparable across countries—a debatable assumption—then it appears the United States has found the secret to success. Its universities practically define what a university is.

Then again, who really cares about these rankings? Nearly every university leader in the world agrees they make a mockery of modern higher education when they reduce it to a national horse race measured chiefly by money—whether in the form of financial resources per student, income from industry, or intellectual property. (It helps if a university is rich, with relatively few undergraduates and research focused on science, technology, or engineering.) While the rankers claim their contribution is to aid readers—parents, scholars, governments, or donors—who seek to ascertain the value of a given university in an internationally competitive economy of knowledge, they also commodify higher education, whose aims they conceive in commercial terms. In a global market where university credentials themselves have become consumer goods, magazine editors promise to assist comparative shoppers.

Perhaps one should not be surprised. As early as 1902, in a short essay titled Academic Freedom, philosopher John Dewey noted that American universities were increasingly ranked by their obvious material prosperity, until the atmosphere of money-getting and money-spending hides from view the interests for the sake of which money alone has a place. Four years later, in 1906, psychologist Joseph Jastrow at the University of Wisconsin extended this critique in The Academic Career as Affected by Administration, published in the journal Science. He pointed to professors whose devotion to statistically measured success caused them to degenerate into a decidedly ‘business’ frame of mind, one that led the scholar not to new discoveries but simply to advertise his wares and advance his trade, eager for new markets. A crippling sense of accountability to markets, Jastrow said, was likely to crowd out . . . every other serious purpose.¹

A dozen years later, American sociologist Thorstein Veblen took up the same topic in his landmark book The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen (1918). Veblen observed that, as soon as the modern American university sought a place of prominence on the world stage, its administrators became preoccupied with the need to publicize its accomplishments. Stanford University, for example, started to release a yearly list of its faculty’s output, sent to newspapers everywhere. Clearly, wrote Veblen, it had become a necessity, from the administrator’s point of view, to foster the prestigeful evidences of original inquiry. According to Veblen, the pursuit of publicity soon became its own end. To garner reputation, both nationally and internationally, universities directed funds to research that was likely to win recognition—ideally, from business and industry.²

Before long, noted Veblen, new metrics of university production had transformed scholarship into a form of standardized industrial labor. Faculty, he argued, had become factory workers, their ideas tallied as manufactured parts. The system of scholastic accountancy, he wrote, has reduced all the relevant items to such standard units and thorough equivalence as should make a system of piece-wages almost a matter of course. Veblen was dismayed. These things . . . hinder rather than help the cause of learning, he remarked, in that they divert attention and effort from scholarly workmanship to statistics and salesmanship. The modern American university had become an intellectual assembly line, and whatever superficial gain might accrue to a highly ranked institution was merely a differential gain in competition with rival seats of learning, not a gain to the republic of [letters] or the academic community at large.³

Veblen thought his observations were new, but in fact they would have sounded familiar to his counterparts a full century earlier. This book explains why. It shows how the very idea of a modern American university, often identified with the second industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century, actually took shape during the first industrial revolution of the early nineteenth century—and it did so for a specific reason. It was the institution best suited to meet the demands of a new industrial era. A product of intense national and international competition to control the economy of higher education, its triumph resulted from the fact that, more than any college (an institution associated with classicism, denominationalism, and localism), the university promised to institutionalize the mass production and mass consumption of knowledge, or what this book calls the industrialization of ideas.

The Industrialization of Ideas

In the United States, as in Europe, the idea of a modern university took root in the early decades of the nineteenth century, not yet in the form of a research university (that innovation was indeed a product of the second industrial revolution) but rather in the form of a new kind of institution competitively devoted to an open choice of studies—from classical-literary to practical-scientific—and directed toward a greater number of students from a wider range of social backgrounds. As was the case with later developments in American higher education (for instance, the Morrill Act of 1862, which encouraged the evolution of research universities on an ever-larger scale), the early nineteenth-century idea of a university was born from war—in this case, the War of 1812—and motivated by dramatic cultural and political, as well as commercial and industrial, change. And for better or worse, it set the stage for subsequent innovations.

As initial postrevolutionary hopes for a national university began to fade, two states took steps to create more local versions of such an institution: Virginia in the south and Massachusetts in the north. Both faced a series of difficult questions. How should a university be funded? What should be its curriculum? Who should be its professors and students? And, perhaps most contentious of all, was there room in the United States for more than one university? Thomas Jefferson, the impresario behind the University of Virginia, thought so, as did a small group of academic modernizers at Harvard who had been amazed by the rapid progress of German higher education. Yet none was sure how to win the support of the broader public for the idea of a university, nor, crucially, in a time of economic turbulence after the Panic of 1819, how to sell this idea to members of their regions’ nascent middle classes.

How did they do it? Despite their many differences, the University of Virginia and Harvard shared one reform in common: both experimented with an elective curriculum that gave students unprecedented freedom to choose nonclassical courses and then paid their professors by enrollment. In this way, they hoped to generate a vigorous spirit of competition as faculty struggled for reputation and, in turn, market share. Aligned with their era’s ascendant ideology of laissez-faire, both institutions made professors into producers and students into consumers of (commodified) knowledge. At first, this approach seemed to succeed, but as it stretched into every aspect of academic life, it brought a backlash against the increasing mechanization of teaching and materialization of learning in American higher education. The result was a heated debate about the rise of the university and the unintended consequences of its controversial industrialization of ideas.

This debate paralleled a broader debate over the rise of market liberalism in the American economy, a debate between commercial free traders and industrial protectionists with different views of national development—not least the relative importance of private versus public support for scholarly production. Ironically for the history of American higher education, no sooner had the University of Virginia consolidated public support than it faced a southern descent into laissez-faire absolutism that weakened its claim to further aid. Harvard, meanwhile, though an eager recipient of public funds, took another path in which it positioned itself rhetorically on the side of private support (and free trade) but pulled most of its resources from a northern industrial middle class that benefited from government subsidies to manufactures—aid funded by federal tariff policies that southern planters called sectionally unfair. Even quasi-private Harvard received indirect public aid.

In some ways, the forces of institutional development in American higher education were nationally (and regionally) specific, but in other ways they were transnational in scope. American scholars in the early nineteenth century discovered the German university, which seemed (at first) to represent all that was liberal and modern in contemporary letters and science. They admired the Germans’ apparent freedom of teaching and learning, their extraordinary academic productivity, and the vast scope of their universities (though, as in the United States, less than 1 percent of German men pursued higher education in this period, and virtually no German women did). Yet, as they soon realized, the same forces that shaped German higher education also shaped American higher education. As ideas became commodities, degrees became consumer goods, and scholars became workers in a much larger process of institutional change to educate a new middle class.

This book, the second of a pair, shows how the idea of a modern American university was born in the early nineteenth century from the dual influence of industrialism and liberalism. The first volume in the series, Exchange of Ideas: The Economy of Higher Education in Early America, followed the market revolution of the mid-to-late eighteenth century to reveal how a commodification of higher education during the colonial and early national periods incorporated academic knowledge into the broader sphere of transatlantic commercial relations. This volume, Capital of Mind: The Idea of a Modern American University, carries the story forward into the age of manufactures to show how a new institutional form arose from a desire to facilitate the mass production and mass consumption of useful knowledge—and, ultimately, the competitive industrialization of ideas—for members of a nascent middle class.

Chronologies of Academic Capitalism

To a remarkable degree, the university’s industrialization of ideas paralleled the broader processes of industrialization during this period. For instance, even as Harvard and the University of Virginia pursued intellectual mass production, new processes of industrial mass production unfolded not far away in the federal armories of Springfield, Massachusetts, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in early rifle manufactures. After 1816, through public-private partnerships like those in higher education, these armories famously institutionalized the American System of mass production assisted by protective tariffs, with interchangeable parts, mechanical assembly, interfactory coordination, bulk-output payment systems, administrative bureaucratization, and subdivisions of labor, each of which had analogs in the emergent university, with its elective system, lecture method, standardized textbooks, course-fee structures, managerial supervision, and increasing disciplinary specialization.⁴

Despite these connections, nearly all historians place the idea of the American university in the late nineteenth century. Frederick Rudolph’s classic American College and University: A History (1962) and Laurence Veysey’s canonical Emergence of the American University (1965) both minimized the early nineteenth-century roots of the university idea and set the stage for what later historians called the age of the university at century’s end—as in Bruce Leslie’s valuable Gentlemen and Scholars: Colleges and Community in the Age of the University (1992), Julie Reuben’s indispensable Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (1996), James Axtell’s synthesis in Wisdom’s Workshop: The Rise of the Modern University (2012), David Labaree’s iconoclastic A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education (2017), and Ethan Ris’s more recent Other People’s Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform (2022).⁵

Other accounts repeat the same periodization. Burton Bledstein centered his examination of the political economy of the modern university during the late nineteenth century in his landmark Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (1976), a topic carried forward in Clyde Barrow’s instructive Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894–1928 (1990), Scott Gelber’s brilliant The University and the People: Envisioning American Higher Education in an Era of Populist Protest (2011), and Nathan Sorber’s terrific Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt: The Origins of the Morrill Act and the Reform of Higher Education (2018), each of which considers higher education for a new industrial middle class a mid-to-late-nineteenth-century phenomenon.⁶

This list could be lengthened to include a wide range of works that glance at the history of higher education: new histories of industrialism and capitalism, science and technology, and culture and ideas. All place the rise of the modern American university in the second half of the nineteenth century. While histories such as Anja Werner’s helpful Transatlantic World of Higher Education: Americans at German Universities (2013) and Emily Levine’s masterful Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University (2021) set the story in a wider transatlantic context, these works too adopt the standard chronology and the assumption that American universities arose during the second industrial revolution instead of the first. But what if these works find the emergence of the American university in a period that merely saw the expansion of a liberal-industrial structure initiated decades before?⁷

Granted, most histories of the earlier period also overlook the process of industrialization that lay beneath the more visible classical and denominational attributes of American higher education at the start of the nineteenth century. Important works from Donald Tewksbury, Douglas Sloan, John Whitehead, Howard Miller, and Steven Novak set out an image of American colleges before the Civil War as preoccupied almost exclusively with religion and republicanism. This image persisted in works by Jürgen Herbst, David Robson, Louise Stevenson, Mark Noll, George Marsden, Caroline Winterer, and others, all of whom rehearse the idea that American students and scholars during the first half of the nineteenth century rarely looked up from their Livy or Leviticus and thus reinforce the impression that collegians during this period either ignored or were somehow immune to fundamental economic changes during this era.⁸

The present work does not discount the influence of classicism or denominationalism in American higher education during the early nineteenth century. It simply argues that both were subordinated to a deeper structural transformation, namely, the emergence of a new industrial economy of higher education rooted in liberal ideals of market competition. Even if the modern university did not achieve its full institutional form until the second half of the century (in a set of research institutions funded by federal land grants as well as federally subsidized industrial fortunes), it built on ideas from the first half, most notably the idea—born of a new industrial age—that a free and open university should be supported by the state to foster the mass production and mass consumption of knowledge for a new middle class. For better or worse, it was this idea that enabled American higher education to step beyond classicism and denominationalism. It was this idea that made the university modern.

Introduction

A Favorable Season

When he stepped onto the modest platform hastily erected in the Patent Office for his seventh annual message to Congress in December 1815, President James Madison did his best to project an image of confidence. Displaced from the burned-out Capitol after the British attack on Washington sixteen months earlier, the nation’s legislators needed reassurance that better days lay ahead. Madison’s speech did not disappoint. He predicted a sizable budget surplus to support a wide array of national projects, including new army fortifications and navy ships as well as the enlargement of the military academy already established [at West Point] and the establishment of others in other sections of the union, not to mention a network of new roads, bridges, canals, and other domestic improvements that required financial resources beyond the reach of individual states.¹

Then came a request Madison considered particularly important: a national university. The present is a favorable season for bringing again into view the establishment of a national seminary of learning within the District of Columbia, he intoned, aware that his predecessors had made similar requests. Such an institution required the patronage of Congress, not only as a monument of their solicitude for the advancement of knowledge, without which the blessings of liberty cannot be fully enjoyed, but also as a model instructive in the formation of other seminaries; a nursery of enlightened preceptors; and a central resort of youth and genius from every part of the country, diffusing, on their return, examples of those national feelings, liberal sentiments, and congenial manners which cement our union and strengthen the great political fabric of which that is the foundation.²

Now was the moment to establish such an institution, Madison held, for the United States had an opportunity to match its recent demonstration of military power with a similar demonstration of mental power. While other portions of mankind are laboring under the distresses of war or struggling with adversity in other forms, the United States are in the tranquil enjoyment of prosperous and honorable peace, he noted. It remains for the guardians of the public welfare to . . . cherish institutions which guarantee their safety and their liberties. A national university would be such an institution. It would move the nation forward together. With memories of the secessionist Hartford Convention fresh in mind, Madison held that a national center of science would put to rest all sectional divisions and pave the way for a shared prosperity—underwritten by a generous plan of federal aid to support the production and distribution of knowledge.³

The idea of a national university was not, of course, new. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had outlined similar plans on several occasions, and Congress had debated the issue at least twice, but the project had never come to pass. Madison hoped the recent experience of war might inspire the nation—finally—to act. In his mind, no modern nation could flourish without a university, by which he meant an institution to prepare students for the learned professions and provide broad access to knowledge in every field of letters and science. Modern societies were knowledge societies: they rose or fell on the basis of their capacity for intellectual production. Europe, with a university in each little principality, had learned this lesson well, but the United States, with its small and relatively insignificant colleges, lagged behind. It was time, Madison said, for a truly national—a truly modern—university.

Or was it? As subsequent months would show, Madison’s proposal went the way of its precursors, which is to say nowhere. Opposed by representatives from states with colleges that felt threatened by the prospect of a federally supported rival, the plan died in committee, dispatched with the comment that Congress had no constitutional authority to fund such an institution. Yet, the defeat of the national university did not relieve the United States of the need for universities as such, and the postwar era witnessed a historic debate over the best way to get them, if not at the federal level, then in the states. All but the poorest kingdoms abroad had their own universities, so why not their American counterparts? Motivated by this question, legislators everywhere began to look for ways to found—and fund—institutions that could legitimately claim the status of universities.

It would be hard to exaggerate the competition that ensued. It stretched from north to south, from east to west. As the newly inaugurated president of the University of Vermont commented in 1815: The Vermontese do not intend to fall behind their fellow citizens of the other sections of the United States in cultivating liberal science. Just as the universities of Europe received ample patronage from their states, American universities should receive similar encouragement. A public university is, with regard to its literary, moral, and religious interests and influence, the heart of a community, to which the blood flows in from the extremities and from which it returns with its nutrifying power, through numerous channels, giving vigor, activity, and beauty to the whole system, he observed. No great advancement in literature is to be expected but through the aid of public universities.⁴

Such comments did not go unnoticed. Virtually every state discussed the need for more aid to higher education. A graduate of South Carolina College, aware of increased assistance to the universities of North Carolina and Georgia, noted his own state’s efforts to keep up. The legislature . . . has manifested a praiseworthy liberality with its appropriations for the support of the institution, he observed in 1816 as public aid jumped from $10,000 to $15,000 a year, a sum greater than any other southern legislature directed toward higher education. The state contributed $6,000 for a new science hall (the first in any southern college) and boosted the president’s salary to $3,500 (the highest of any college leader in country). Among the institution’s faculty was a new professor of agricultural chemistry, supported by the state at $2,000 a year to keep pace with the development of industrial chemistry up north.⁵

The same year, the state legislature in New Hampshire rechartered Dartmouth College as the public Dartmouth University and reassigned all its assets to new functions—a move the US Supreme Court subsequently invalidated, but not before the case put other institutions on notice. When the Brown University Alumni Club launched a fund drive in this period, it stressed the need to be competitive. Other institutions in the vicinity are quickly extending themselves and rising higher and higher in point of academical advantage, and public estimation, it noted. If we, in the meantime, remain stationary, what is our situation? Though stationary, we are relatively and rapidly declining. To make Brown a modern university, its alumni sought aid for a medical school, chemical laboratory, mineral cabinet, botanical garden, and library. They put their request in boldface caps: "SOMETHING MUST BE DONE."⁶

The Idea of a University

Yet, at the start of the nineteenth century, the idea of a modern university was still inchoate. Some thought a university was simply a collection of undergraduate colleges (as in Oxford and Cambridge). Others believed a university should have a predominantly technical curriculum (as in the École Polytechnique in Paris). Still others said a university implied a place where postgraduates could attend fee-based lectures with no obligation to sit for degrees (as in the Royal Institution in London). In 1815, the idea of a university was vague—amorphous—embryonic. Its advocates were divided over what a university was. Its courses were to be not only classical but also practical. Its students were to be not only local but also national, even international. Its standards were to be meritocratic but also, somehow, democratic. In the end, they agreed, a university should be more open, more liberal, and its very liberalism would make it modern.

For examples of such an institution, Americans looked abroad. For many, the archetype was the University of Berlin, founded a half decade earlier. Like its predecessors, the University of Berlin offered professional studies in law, medicine, and theology, and philosophical studies in letters and science. Its students could attend lectures on any subject as long as they paid the requisite fees. What made the University of Berlin modern was its link between open-access lectures and its opportunities for students to follow their own educational interests. Previously, in Europe, universities had been institutions for traditional, didactic, approved instruction, while more advanced, exploratory, or specialized investigation occurred in separate (often royal) societies or academies. The University of Berlin—where lectures were supported by libraries and laboratories on an unprecedented scale—represented a new way to organize academic work.⁷

Why this change? Why in Berlin? And why in the first decade of the nineteenth century? In a sense, the answer was uniquely Prussian, for, as many scholars have observed, the idea of a modern university was part of a broader reaction against Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussian military and occupation of that country. In the wake of this humiliation, Berliners had called for national recovery through intellectual revival. At the same time, even as the modernization of higher education responded to important cultural forces, it also reflected a larger set of changes in European political economy—changes that had left Prussia vulnerable to conquest in the first place. These changes stemmed from the subtle but significant effects of industrialization and the struggle for power that followed the rapid transformation of agricultural-commercial societies—first Britain, then France—into modern centers of mechanization.

The modernization of German higher education was part of this process. During the eighteenth century, the German nobility had resisted industrialization (though naval blockades during the Napoleonic Wars temporarily boosted manufactures on the Continent). Only after the return of peace brought a flood of British imports to Continental markets did more Germans begin to see how, in the future, national power would hinge on industrial power and, thus, on the production and distribution of knowledge (including applied scientific knowledge) on a mass scale. Even more than British or French universities, German universities led this change. Their aim was an industrialization of ideas to serve the developmental interests of the state—humanistic, scientific, and economic. Indeed, by the second decade of the nineteenth century, it seemed that a modern university was an institution no German principality could do without.

In this context, it became obvious to James Madison and his contemporaries that, somehow, the United States had to establish a university of its own, a way to make the nation competitive on the world stage. Of course, in 1815, calls for a modern American university were not entirely new; they did not emerge all of a sudden after the Napoleonic Wars. Similar calls had been heard ever since the war for independence. As early as 1783, the German scholar Johann Reinhold Forster had sent Benjamin Franklin a detailed proposal for a national university, and four years later the chevalier Alexandre-Marie Quesnay de Beaurepaire of France (a grandson of the famed political economist François Quesnay) had devised a related plan with a focus on technological development and the industrial arts. Others followed—but none came to fruition. All were derailed by a political system that prioritized smaller classical schools in the various states.⁸

Put simply, the federalist structure of American government seemed incompatible with a university on a modern scale. What had begun with a college for every colony had evolved into a decentralized system that left higher education in the hands of individual states (not unlike the prenational German system). This structure was reinforced by a lack of any reference to education in the US Constitution and, thus, strict limits on congressional power to foster the production or distribution of more advanced knowledge. And with extant colleges uniformly hostile to any prospect of a federally supported—and ostensibly nonclassical and nonsectarian—rival, the idea of a national center of science never got off the ground. Instead, the states vied to reform higher education on their own, and the extraordinary competition that arose from their efforts played a key role in the development of the modern American university.

In the race for a modern university, two states jumped out ahead: Virginia in the south and Massachusetts in the north. Both launched aggressive efforts to refashion higher learning—efforts with deep historical roots in each state. As early as 1779, when Thomas Jefferson was governor of Virginia, he set out to reform the College of William and Mary along university lines (complete with a quasi-elective system that gave students more freedom to choose nonclassical courses), but he found his alma mater resistant to change. Later, as president, he cautiously supported the idea of a national university, but when that idea foundered, he turned his gaze back to Virginia and, in 1814, even as British troops approached, took up the cause of a university funded by the state in which all the branches of science useful to us . . . at this day should be taught in their highest degree. For the next decade, he worked to build the University of Virginia into an institution that could equal the best, whether at home or abroad.⁹

One institution he sought to outdo was Harvard, which made its own bid for modernity in this era. Just as Jefferson had sought the proceeds of a state tax on banks to support his university, Harvard in 1814 secured a state grant that promised $100,000 over ten years from a similar tax. When combined with another $125,000 in private contributions, this aid put Harvard in position to become a true university, a prospect further advanced by intelligence gleaned from several graduates’ visits to German universities during this era. Jefferson, who kept a jealous eye on all potential rivals (particularly those in the north), saw in Harvard’s progress a spur to action, for it signaled an increasingly competitive market in American higher education. One question for Jefferson was how to found (and fund) a university in the south; another was how a more open—liberal—competition for students would shape the very idea of a university itself.

Market Liberalism and the Modern University

At its core, this book is about the parallel emergence of a new institution—the modern university—and a new ideology—market liberalism (in relation to modern industrialism). Wherever it arose, in Europe or America, the modern university was a fundamentally liberal institution, one that emphasized an unhindered freedom of teaching and learning that distinguished it from earlier institutional forms. It was also liberal in other ways. It was inventive. It was innovative. Above all, it was intensely competitive, not only at the individual and institutional levels but also at the national and international levels. Its aim was to expand the production and consumption of useful ideas and, hence, to extend the power and prosperity of the state (relative to other states). As it gave institutional form to an ever-more-competitive economy of knowledge, the university took shape in tandem with market liberalism—itself a framework to structure modern industrialism.

Of course, this era’s market liberalism did not emerge from nowhere. It was a response to prior ideological shifts, notably the failures of eighteenth-century political economies associated with monarchism and, subsequently, republicanism. At the risk of oversimplification, the age of revolutions had replaced older systems grounded in the authority of the absolutist state with newer models rooted in the active participation and self-governance of allegedly free and independent citizens. The glue that held the new republican societies together was the notion of a public interest, or common good, that linked a set of shared moral and ethical (if not spiritual) values to forms of government that balanced the self-interested forces of faction with the idea of a general welfare. This broad ideology shaped everything from economics to education, and in many ways it represented a noble ideal, not least in American colleges. But it did not last.¹⁰

By the early nineteenth century, the presuppositions that underpinned the republican order had begun to fray. In the United States, increasing partisanship slowly weakened the principle of a unified public interest, and the economic diversification that arose when agriculture was supplemented by industry fed new forms of class differentiation, which, in turn, led to new sectional tensions. Unable to sustain the original values of the revolution, Americans searched for a new approach to social organization. Consciously or unconsciously, they settled on liberalism. With its frank acknowledgment of the unavoidability of interests and its abiding faith in the moral authority of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, liberalism made the vice of selfishness into a virtue. Whether in the guise of economic markets or democratic politics, the liberal motto of the early nineteenth century, both inside and outside colleges, was that it was impossible to have too much competition.

The parallel rise of market liberalism and modern industrialism had serious implications for American higher education and, specifically, for the fate of the old-time college. In place of an earlier prescribed course of classical study, the university promised a free choice of (increasingly practical) courses. This change was significant for students (now encouraged to follow their own interests), but it was perhaps even more significant for professors (now expected to compete head-to-head for enrollment). The university, with its elective curriculum and voluntary participation, required professors to cater to student demand. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the faculty responded with the same pedagogical move their European peers had made: they replaced individual recitations with mass lectures, a more efficient way to increase enrollments and, in turn, income from student fees. They also began to publish more textbooks—another way to pad their pay.

While the university’s liberal system of elective courses gave students a previously unimaginable range of choices (and generated an extraordinary number of new publications, if not always new ideas), this reform had unintended consequences. It defined students increasingly as consumers and, in this way, dramatically accelerated the overall commercialization of higher education. The liberalization of the curriculum reduced knowledge to a commodity sold to members of an emergent middle class. In fact, it helped to make the new professional—credentialed—middle class, and inasmuch as students represented a form of revenue for the university, its aim was to market its wares to as many as possible. Success became a matter of scale: the institution that was most effective in the competition for students was said not only to achieve the size of a university but also to attain for its state the most favorable balance of educational trade.

How, then, could a state win this contest? How could it build the best university? While liberal purists said higher education—like any other enterprise—should be funded entirely with private user fees, it seemed to many university advocates in the early nineteenth century that, if a state wanted to compete for students and scholars on a genuinely international scale, then supplemental financial support would have to come from the state. Yet, appeals for public resources raised a host of questions. For example, should the public fund one university, or many? If one, how could it prevent an intellectual monopoly? If many, how could its actions preserve a spirit of competition among them? If the European case offered any clues, then a modern university could not succeed without public support, but no issue proved trickier for the idea of a university in relation to market liberalism: how much aid should a university receive from its state?

Answers differed. Thomas Jefferson, for example, insisted that his university should be the only institution of higher education in Virginia to receive any legislative funds. His counterparts in Massachusetts, in the meantime, distributed aid not only to Harvard but also to nonuniversity contenders Bowdoin and Williams, that is, until the state’s bank tax expired in 1824, after which the legislature discontinued aid to higher education. It justified this move on grounds that Massachusetts’s higher-education market had to be liberalized (and it was no coincidence that Harvard also sought to undermine the newly founded Amherst College and its bid for support). In fact, by the late 1820s, most northern states had withdrawn aid from higher education. Once considered essential for the success of a modern university, state aid was slowly abandoned in favor of a new ideology of laissez-faire—combined, perhaps surprisingly, with new forms of federal aid.

In place of direct state aid, northern universities increasingly benefited from indirect aid in the form of federal tariffs, revenue from which funded domestic improvements like roads and canals that supported the process of industrialization. These improvements—bankrolled with tariff aid—bolstered the (ostensibly private) fortunes of northern manufacturers, who shared their money with institutions like Harvard in the form of philanthropic contributions. As historian Ronald Story has shown, roughly 80 percent of Massachusetts’s antebellum millionaires contributed at least $1,000 to Harvard’s quest to become a university. Southerners complained that Congress used revenue from one section to subsidize another, but such protests failed in part because their stridently liberal antistatist ideology subverted their own claims to government aid. The result, after the 1830s, was a continued modernization of higher education in the north, and stagnation in the south.¹¹

The Structure of This Book

To explain this evolution, this book has three parts, each with six chapters that follow the idea of a university through various twists and turns in the early nineteenth-century American economy of higher education. The chapters move back and forth across different geographies—not only Charlottesville, Virginia, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, but also Göttingen, Berlin, Paris, and Edinburgh—and their interlaced (but also locally distinct) narratives about the idea of a university: its purposes, possibilities, and pitfalls. A small cast of characters who corresponded across these geographies and carried forward the crusade for university reform—Thomas Jefferson and his legislative ally Joseph Cabell in the south; Harvard affiliates George Ticknor, Edward Everett, George Bancroft, and John Thornton Kirkland in the north—start the story, which slowly expands into a transatlantic concatenation of debates over the strengths and weaknesses of this new institutional form. Only in the end would its subtle industrialization of ideas become evident.

Part 1, The Idea of a ‘University,’ 1812–18, sets the stage. Chapters 1 and 2 follow Jefferson as he began to sketch an initial plan for a modern university. His first blueprints took shape as early as 1800 when he plotted his first presidential campaign, but despite his establishment of West Point and his support for a national university, he did little with his plan until he left the White House and returned home to Monticello, where, after 1814, he worked to reshape a moribund academy into a college, then a university. His main obstacle—and the obstacle that delayed his plans for a decade—was money. How could he win public support for the untried idea of a university, and how could he ensure that his institution outcompeted all others for whatever aid Virginians (riven by complex internal politics) might offer? No issue vexed Jefferson more than money as he set out to create a modern center of science in his native state.

Jefferson, of course, was not alone in his quest for a university. Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 follow his correspondence with George Ticknor, a young Bostonian with similar reformist ambitions whose fascination with the idea of a university, like Jefferson’s, originated in the early years of the nineteenth century. Whereas the elder statesman had looked to French science as the model for his reforms, Ticknor looked to German letters, especially to Göttingen, where, on a postwar sojourn with Edward Everett, he was awed by the scale and spirit of German scholarship and gradually awakened to new possibilities for the mass production and mass consumption of academic knowledge. Ticknor shared his dreams with Jefferson (and even angled for a post at his university before he accepted a spot at Harvard), but it was his fellow student George Bancroft whose critical perspective on the political economy of German universities proved most prescient over time.

Part 2, The Economy of Knowledge, 1818–24, opens with Bancroft’s commentary on the struggle between students and the state to control the German economy of higher education—just as Ticknor and Edward left to complete their preparations for their respective professorships at Harvard, an institution they hoped to remake in Göttingen’s image (as chapter 7 shows, they celebrated a spirit of academic liberalism in German universities at the very moment those institutions succumbed to illiberal government constraints). Everett used Jefferson’s proposal for the University of Virginia to advocate for change at Harvard, while Jefferson cited developments at Harvard to win support for his own efforts. Both made progress until, as chapter 8 reveals, the economically disastrous Panic of 1819 brought their reforms to a sudden halt. As the banks that held university funds collapsed, petitions to replace local with state or even federal aid did, too.

The recession that ensued had profound effects on American higher education and, in particular, the idea of the university. Chapters 9 and 10 trace new courses and textbooks in the field of political economy that sprang up across the country as students debated the causes and consequences of the financial crisis. One text in particular, Daniel Raymond’s influential Thoughts on Political Economy, drew attention with its claim that national wealth required government support for science. Of course, the form such aid should take was a subject of disagreement. For example, when the nation’s printers asked for high tariffs on imported books, scholars replied that such policies raised the price of knowledge and violated the free-trade ideals that undergirded intellectual exchange. What followed was a dispute between protectionists and liberals over the ideological substructure of a modern university. Some continued to call for government aid; others said that useful ideas should be able to support themselves.¹²

Chapters 11 and 12 chart the institutional consequences of these debates over the liberalization of higher education. In 1823, for example, George Ticknor at Harvard responded to a series of student protests with a call to give undergraduates more freedom to choose their own courses, but when his protégé George Calvert went to Göttingen that year, he found that an open choice of studies could lead to a commercialization of scholarship, and ultimately a consumerist mentality among middle-class students who commodified ideas as mere credentials. Similar concerns surfaced in American institutions. Even as Harvard supplemented its prescribed curriculum with voluntary fee-based electives to meet popular demand, it split the faculty between those who favored liberal reforms and those who feared that professors’ competitive quest for profit would take control of the institution and transmute academic labor into a form of industrial piecework.

Part 3, The Industrialization of Ideas, 1824–30, brings these concerns to a head as new industrial schools challenged traditional colleges for dominance in the contemporary higher-education market. Chapters 13 and 14 document the fierce defense of domestic scholarly labor that arose when the University of Virginia finally opened with a faculty imported from Europe and insisted that intellectual exchange should not be included in the TARIFF.¹³ Chapters 15 and 16 carry these debates from Virginia to South Carolina, where Jefferson’s colleague Thomas Cooper, president of South Carolina College, extended the criticism of tariffs into an extremist crusade against state aid to institutions of all kinds, including universities. In the meantime, Cooper’s opponent, the German immigrant Friedrich List (once a leader of the liberal student movement in Württemberg), became a key spokesman for public aid to practical higher education, specifically to serve the nation’s industrial middle classes.

List—who had plans for a National Polytechnic School and National Institute of Political Economy—argued that, in the international contest for intellectual supremacy, a blind embrace of academic laissez-faire could leave the United States behind. Truly advanced scholarship on a mass scale required state aid, either through direct public support or through indirect government policies that fostered private support. Chapters 17 and 18 see this hope come to fruition as the idea of a university spread in the late 1820s to cities across the country. List promoted the idea in Philadelphia while contemporaries in New York took steps in the early 1830s to create a university on a liberal and extensive scale with a wholly elective curriculum of useful subjects. Modeled after its German counterparts (as well as the new University of London), plans for New York University were marketed explicitly to members of the city’s mercantile and industrial middle classes.

But, for all the popularity of its practical and professional courses, this new institution struggled. Even though it drew students away from Columbia (which fought to keep them), it could not yet draw enough fee payers to support its faculty, whose income depended on students’ desire for their courses. It was unclear whether New York City—or indeed any US city—had sufficient demand to support more than one university. Particularly after the Panic of 1837, this question became acute, even as the basic structural-industrial forces that had spurred the idea of a university in the first place endured—and entered the popular mind. Over the next three decades, whether in technical schools affiliated with traditional colleges or, later, in the merger of these enterprises, the idea of a university to serve an increasingly dominant industrial middle class achieved its recognizable modern form.

Origins versus Anachronisms

The idea of a modern American university did not take shape all of a sudden or emerge fully realized in a single institution, nor was the industrialization of ideas that came to define the modern university evident from the start. On the contrary, as this book shows, the idea of a university arose slowly, and it followed a circuitous path. It took different forms in different places (even as the figures associated with its formation in both Virginia and Massachusetts were in touch with one another to a remarkable degree). Some might say there were many ideas of a university, each reflective of local circumstances but linked to national and international debates about the purposes of higher education and the overall economy of knowledge. During the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the idea of a modern American university was not perfectly or neatly defined. It was imprecise, immature, incipient.

The indeterminacy of any idea at its origin can give it a nebulous quality. So it was in the case of the idea of a university, often interpreted anachronistically as not-yet-realized in relation to some later conception of what a university is, or should be. Whether in Virginia or Massachusetts, those who sought to reform higher education in the early nineteenth century used the late medieval word university, but they were unsure about its modern institutional organization: its students, faculty, or curriculum. They were unclear about whether a university should compete with colleges for resources or, instead, claim a monopoly over the means of academic production (or the credentials that signified the highest levels of intellectual attainment), just as they were unclear about how a university should treat ideas themselves: as transcendent expressions of the human soul or as marketable goods for sale (itself a question with medieval roots).

Of course, none of these aspects of the university idea achieved full resolution during the early decades of the nineteenth century (or even the early twenty-first). But in the decisions that surrounded the creation of the University of Virginia and the debates that surfaced in the context of curricular reform at Harvard, the idea of a modern American university took shape, gained definition, and entered public consciousness in a way that influenced later developments. And herein lies the argument of this book: the idea of a modern American university arose earlier than most scholars have recognized; it took different forms in different places, yet its fundamental aim was always to facilitate a mass production and mass consumption of useful knowledge for members of a new middle class; and the result, by the mid-nineteenth century, was an institution purpose built for a broader industrialization of ideas.

The idea of a modern American university thus arose within a dynamic political economy of knowledge. Part of an effort to make the United States a great power on the global stage—both industrially and intellectually—the idea took many years to realize its full institutional form, but it got its start during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. As the outspoken Friedrich List noted in 1827, any nation that hoped to lead the world in the modern age would have to control the production and distribution of knowledge, and the United States held this prospect more in their power than any other nation, because they possess more . . . capital of mind.¹⁴ This book—simultaneously a history of ideas, a history of higher education, and a history of capitalism—explains how mind became capital during the early nineteenth century and how the idea of a modern American university played a central role in that process.

Today, of course, the idea of a university is practically inextricable from industry. From complex intellectual property regimes to new public-private financial partnerships between universities and business, the notion that university-based research and human capital drive economic development—and in turn the wealth of nations—is a fundamental article of faith among contemporary academic managers around the world. Indeed, one might say that if the industrialization of ideas got its start during the first industrial revolution and built up momentum during the second (when it expanded, via imperialism and war, into South and Central America as well as South Asia, East Asia, Australia, and the Middle East), then it set entirely new speed records during the so-called third industrial revolution of the late twentieth century, with the dawn of the computer age.

It would be hard to overstate the ways in which computerization accelerated the mass production and mass consumption of knowledge in the modern university. Libraries and laboratories, classrooms and campuses were forever changed by the ability to process seemingly infinite data in an instant. New information and communication technologies as well as new systems and network theories fostered not only new forms of academic collaboration (think Big Science, with interconnected researchers around the world, and even in space) but also new forms of student access (via distance education and the World Wide Web, not to mention new economies of scale that came with faster processors, larger mainframes, and more bandwidth). Universities grew to unprecedented size, and just as the first two industrial revolutions made business-minded universities into sites of social mobility and entry into an educated middle class (at least for some), so did the third.

Yet, as important as these changes have been, they stand to be eclipsed by today’s fourth industrial revolution, an era of smart technologies, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, sensory robotics, behavioral algorithms, genetic alterations, cyber systems, nano devices, and quantum machines, all subsumed within a vast internet of things. And just as prior industrial revolutions led to changes in higher education (and every other social institution), one can expect this latest revolution to have similarly massive effects. As supercomputers approach Super Intelligence, billions of times more powerful than any human brain, and more aspects of higher education go online, instructional practices (even instructors themselves) may become increasingly digitized, if not ultimately dehumanized. How today’s exponential technologies will affect the idea of the university—and its economy of knowledge—remains to be seen, but history can offer clues.

One final note. At heart an intellectual history, this book takes a specific approach to ideas. Like the initial volume in this series, it treats ideas as material artifacts recognizable primarily in their institutional forms. Here, ideas are things—objects—products—commodities. At the center of the story lies the idea of the university itself, which implies not only that ideas found within universities are commodified but also that ideas about the university are commodified. Sometimes, the narrative even suggests that, in the modern university, all ideas risk commodification—to such an extent that it seems almost impossible to evade the forces of epistemological (or educational) instrumentalization. Can universities escape this process of reification, which transforms ideas into the matériel of industrial production and commercial exchange on a mass scale? This book finds that, historically, such a process may be endemic to modern universities as such.¹⁵

Part I

The Idea of a University, 1812–18

Charlottesville

For decades, Thomas Jefferson had wanted the United States to have what he called a university on a plan so broad and liberal and modern as to be worth patronizing with public support. As early as 1779, when he was governor of Virginia, he sought to reform his alma mater, the College of William and Mary, along such lines; and later, during the 1790s, when he served as secretary of state under George Washington, he seconded the president’s calls for a national university to equal any in Europe, a plan he continued to pursue during his own presidency. But none of these efforts produced the institution he wanted. It was not until the War of 1812, when the British army left William and Mary in ruins, that he saw a way forward. He would create a competitor: a new institution, devoted to useful knowledge and funded by the state. With help from his friends, he would transform Albemarle Academy in Charlottesville (just down the hill from his Monticello estate) into Central College, and, from there, into a magnificent University of Virginia that would become a model of modernity for American higher education—and for the world.¹

A bold plan, it prompted objections not only from William and Mary but also from Washington College and Hampden-Sydney College, each of which sought a share of the state’s new Literary Fund, created in 1810. Given its limited resources, they asked, should Virginia fund a single university or, instead, multiple colleges and schools? Jefferson, assisted by his legislative ally Joseph Cabell, argued that a modern university where every branch of science useful at this day may be taught in the highest degree should hold a monopoly on state aid. But such an institution would be expensive, and Jefferson needed to secure its financial base. The Literary Fund was his answer, but relying on it was fraught with risks. The fund had been deposited in the Bank of Virginia, a branch of the Bank of the United States, which had lost its federal charter in 1811 and, during the war, had left its branches in the lurch. Jefferson, aware that northerners had begun to support their colleges with bank taxes, wanted Virginians to do the same—but he was understandably wary of banks. How, then, would he fund his proposed university?²

* 1 *

A Plan of a University in Virginia

As the British army marched from Washington toward Williamsburg in late August 1814, undergraduate students at the College of William and Mary prepared to defend their historic institution from attack. They did not succeed. British troops swept onto campus, turned its buildings into barracks, and pillaged its library and laboratory. Before their departure for Baltimore a week later, they had ransacked the chapel, a landmark structure whose crypt held the bodily remains of bishop James Madison, the college’s beloved president who had died at the age of sixty-five just before the war began (and whose eponymous relative had fled the White House to escape the enemy assault on the capital). When the British finally withdrew, the college was in shambles, and most of its students—all but twenty-one of them—had scattered. According to one account, the institution seemed nearly as low as it can well be, to exist at all.¹

Shortly thereafter, Virginia congressman George Tucker visited Williamsburg to survey the damage. Guided by a member of the faculty, he was shocked by what he saw. The professor led me through different private rooms, which I found so dark and forbidding that I did not wonder their young tenants were not at home, he wrote. The library had fewer than three thousand volumes left on its shelves—the rest stolen or destroyed—while the chapel was covered in strange hieroglyphics drawn upon the walls. The college’s interim president, John Bracken, former mayor of Williamsburg and headmaster of the college’s associated grammar school, was nowhere to be found. He had taken flight at the first report of the British approach (though many said his absence was no great loss, for the faculty had accused him of mismanagement). To some, it seemed the leaderless college might never recover.²

Tucker attributed the college’s troubles not only to British looting but also to long-term public neglect—especially fiscal neglect. Virginia, he wrote, had done little or nothing for its college, except . . . to give it a few old remnants of surveyors’ fees and such things, hardly worth the [difficulty] and disgrace of collection. While other states had granted their colleges up to $10,000 a year, Virginia had given William and Mary only $4,000 or $5,000, which led to low salaries and even lower standards of scholarship. Tucker had not lost all hope for his alma mater, however. This state of nothingness . . . , I hope, for the sake of letters and the commonwealth, will not long continue, he concluded as he looked to a new president—thirty-two-year-old John Augustine Smith, a graduate of the class of 1800 who had attended medical lectures in London and had taught at the