ABSTRACT
On the first centenary of the American Declaration of Independence, the economist Charles Dunbar (1876, p. 140) of Harvard University confessed that ‘the United States have, thus far, done nothing toward developing the theory of political economy’. Harvard, of course, was one of the oldest American universities, dating from the colonial period. But in 1876 it did not have a developed graduate programme of study. The first American university to have a graduate programme was Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876. Stanford University was founded in 1885 and The University of Chicago in 1891. Yale College became a university in 1887, as did Columbia and Princeton in 1896. Overall, the modernised university emerged in America between the 1880s and the First World War (Hofstadter and Hardy, 1952; Veysey, 1965). In the twentieth century, the size of American academia was to be multiplied several times over.
