Faculty Research Projects

Dartmouth College v. Woodward examines the landmark case decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1819 after New Hampshire’s state legislature attempted to amend Dartmouth’s charter to place the college under greater public control. Adam R. Nelson interprets the case not only as one about higher-education governance or American corporate law in an emerging constitutional order, and not simply as a case about the Marshall Court’s preference for “private” over “public” initiative as the primary driver of social and commercial development. More fundamentally, Nelson uses the case to illustrate a broad ideological shift from commonwealth republicanism to market liberalism in both education and jurisprudence during the early nineteenth century.

The question at the heart of the case was: should Dartmouth College be subject to legislative authority? This book finds that when the state court said “yes” but the US Supreme Court said “no,” the divergence between these decisions stemmed not only from different applications of the contracts clause but also from disagreements about the degree to which core institutions in a democracy—whether colleges or churches or companies—should be overseen or regulated by political majorities. Implicit in the Dartmouth case, though never clarified, was the question of whether higher education was a private or public good, and thus whether colleges are better off under private or public control. By choosing the private path, Dartmouth reinforced a gradual privatization of what might otherwise have been considered public goods. Americans today live with the consequences of this decision.

Exchange of Ideas uses insights from the new history of capitalism to show how the market revolution of the mid-eighteenth century penetrated American colleges and pulled scholarship—or the products of intellectual labor—into the sphere of transatlantic commercial relations. It explains how “useful ideas” became “salable goods” that could be factored into an international balance of trade, and how American scholars viewed the resulting commodification of higher education with a mixture of fascination and fear. Along the way, it uncovers the roots of the modern economy of knowledge.

Capital of Mind chronicles the parallel emergence of a new institution—the modern university—and a new ideology—market liberalism. Specifically, it explains how “the idea of a university” arose during the early nineteenth alongside the unprecedented social changes wrought by the first industrial revolution. Shaped by a desire to foster the mass production and mass consumption of “useful” knowledge for members of a new middle class, the university sought to make the United States more “competitive” on the world stage and maximize its capacity for material as well as mental production.

William J. Reese is the author of a forthcoming biography entitled The Calculating Boy: Zerah Colburn, America’s First Child Celebrity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2027). Born in 1804 in Vermont, Colburn was a math prodigy who was exhibited on stage throughout the United States after his talent in arithmetical calculations appeared in 1810. He traveled with his father in Europe and attended prestigious schools in Paris and London. He became the most famous child in America. He became an actor, a teacher, and an employee of the Board of Longitude (in England). Returning to the US in 1824, he became an itinerant Methodist minister, an author, and a professor of ancient and modern languages and literature. But he was always remembered as ‘the calculating boy,” America’s boy wonder.

Dr. Bill Reese is currently researching and writing this book. Funded by a major grant by the Spencer Foundation, it analyzes how federal policies have shaped governance, academic standards, and race relations in the nation’s capital since the nineteenth century. Why has a school system in the shadow of the most powerful government in the world not become world-class? Based on an array of primary sources, it will be the first single-volume history of the Washington, D.C., public schools, from their origins in the early nineteenth century to the recent past.