Historian Adam Nelson reconstructs the intersection of ideas and institutions that brought proposals for a distinctively American model of a university into the public forum during the first half of the nineteenth century. After reading summaries of proposals by numerous authors, one discerns an unexpected thread running through the documents. These often represented polemics and politics rather than coherent analyses about how a new kind of university might be integral as “capital of mind” in an emerging American industrial political economy.

The writers and their publications about universities Nelson interprets bring to mind an expanded version of the letters and pamphlets historians Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith introduced in their classic work, the 1961 anthology, American Higher Education: A Documentary History. A good example was Thomas Jefferson and his letters within a network of colleagues, including Joseph Priestley and George Tickner. A difference that Adam Nelson makes in his 2024 scholarship is uncovering yet more variations on the themes of correspondence within the US and often including scholars in England and Europe.

Surprising and perhaps disappointing is that writers such as Thomas Jefferson made little difference in their own lifetime in their attempts to persuade business and political constituencies to take their academic ideas seriously in providing funding or leadership to turn the ideas into sound institutions. Writers, perhaps a forerunner to our notion of “public intellectuals” of the twenty-first century, had little to show for their initiatives. One might argue that academics gained some place in the industrial economy, with the sale of books representing a form of “capital of mind” that was a growing part of international trade and tariffs. Moreover, some scholars acquired marketplace leverage when university founders competed to hire them to fill faculty positions.

These gains were limited because government relations with academic consumerism did not flourish. Neither Congress nor state legislatures nor industrialists were keen to devote substantial money to funding the institutional proposals. And, when allegedly modern universities were built and eventually opened for instruction, the results were scant and, above all, they did not carry out the ideas of their inventors. The University of Virginia is usually cited as a prime product of the effort to show how mass production and consumption of ideas might transform an American society and economy. In looking at the accounts of the early years, one finds that usually all constituencies were angry with the life and learning in the resultant institutions, albeit for different reasons. Prestigious professors recruited from German universities felt duped. Students showed little interest in the educational philosophies of the founding academics and probably devoted more concern to their magnificent horses along with drinking and dueling than serious study.

One of the most successful emerging new institutions of the era was the University of South Carolina, where President Thomas Cooper educated future Southern leaders with a curriculum that emphasized skills in oratory and disputation connected to the themes of nullification, states’ rights, and free trade. The university was successful in increasing enrollments, and then the alumni were successful as planters and politicians. An institution might become a bully pulpit for presidents such as Thomas Cooper at South Carolina or Thomas Dew at William & Mary, but it is not clear that their universities represented enduring educational excellence.

The sobering historical finding is that although the “academical village” as envisioned by Thomas Jefferson captured the fancy of higher education visionaries of the era, it was more wishful thinking than fulfillment (p. 120). Sad but true is that an institutional fixture in the mid-nineteenth century was “the diploma mill,” whose negative connotations of opportunism and exploitation did in fact bring the imagery and elements of industrial production to American higher education. Nowhere was this more evident than in the proliferation of dubious medical schools.

The foremost obstacle to creating and funding a viable modern university in the young US was the sectionalism of state and regional politics. For politicians and educational innovators in the Northeast and MidAtlantic, tariffs were central to fostering new industries. In stark contrast, planters in the South championed free trade as the ideological key. In addition, each partisan group expected a university curriculum and faculty to present their particular case. This stalemate of ideas and institutions seldom led to sound discussion across the table.

A good example was the fate of Vermont Senator Justin Morrill’s proposed Land Grant Act. It went from proposal to policy owing more to secession than to discussion. With the creation of the Confederacy in 1861, states such as New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania got their way by default in both settlement and sales of western lands as a source of incentive funding for new colleges and universities. Yet, the obvious shortfall was that any prospect for a truly “national system” of serious educational ideas connected to economic development was splintered by the Civil War (p. 340).

Perhaps the higher education ideas introduced between 1800 and 1860 were ahead of their time. A reader is hard pressed to identify any coherent linkages between the early proposals and the subsequent new universities during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. New universities proclaimed the names of wealthy industrialists such as Cornell, Rockefeller, Stanford, and Carnegie. These namesake university builders had little experience with higher learning as an essential feature of their own experiences and successes in business. An innovation such as installing standardized railroad tracks across state lines probably had more impact on the character and success of American industry than did proposals between 1820 and 1860 for the curriculum of a modern university.

On balance, the proposals associated with creating the “capital of mind” provide an unexpected opportunity to fuse classical education with the emerging industrial America. The Latin motto for the period Adam Nelson describes might be, “Caveat emptor!” In the marketplace of ideas and reliance on new universities, the warning to prospective students and donors was, “Let the buyer beware!”