Adam R. Nelson, "Exchange of Ideas: The Economy of Higher Education in Early America" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

The University of Chicago Press Podcast · Feb 18, 2025 · 59m

Exchange of Ideas: The Economy of Higher Education in Early America (U Chicago Press, 2023) launches a breathtakingly ambitious new economic history of American higher education. In this volume, Adam R. Nelson focuses on the early republic, explaining how knowledge itself became a commodity, as useful ideas became salable goods and American colleges were drawn into transatlantic commercial relations. American scholars might once have imagined that higher education could sit beyond the sphere of market activity—that intellectual exchange could transcend vulgar consumerism—but already by the…