Economics in American Engineering Schools

Abstract

History records that political economy received at least perfunctory attention in what were then engineering schools, over one hundred and thirty years ago. In 1827, Valentine B. Horton, who was later to become a Whig congressman and to make and lose a fortune, became “a professor of Moral Philosophy and Political Economy” at the American Literary, Scientific and Military Academy, the forerunner of Norwich University.¹ During the 1840s and ′50s, many engineering schools included a few lectures in moral philosophy and political economy in their programs. More formal and more enthusiastic promotion of economics on engineering campuses was evident under the aegis of Francis Amasa Walker, a noted economist and statistician, who, after service at the Sheffield School at Yale, became president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early l88Os. Under his guidance, and that of Davis R. Dewey, who became an assistant professor of Economics and Statistics at M.I.T. in 1888, economics began to flourish on at least one engineering campus.