Irving Fisher of Yale

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2005 by William J. Barber

Yale had difficulty in coming to terms with Irving Fisher during his lifetime. That phenomenon bears pondering. After all, Fisher was very much a son of Yale. All of his formal higher education--from his undergraduate years to the award of his Ph.D.--carried Yale's seal of approval. His Yale experience was crucial in shaping his professional trajectory. He was often to remark that his work in mathematical economics had been inspired by two Yale mentors: Willard Gibbs, the mathematical physicist, and William Graham Sumner, the political economist who was also the most outspoken Social Darwinist on the American scene. Fisher, it should also be noted, was based at Yale throughout his entire adult life. Only once did he seriously seek fulltime employment outside New Haven. This occurred in 1906 when he lobbied hard, though unsuccessfully, to head the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. (Excluded here is his brief flirtation with running for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1934, an exercise that was quixotic from the start.)

Despite all this, Fisher experienced the fate of a prophet without honor at his own university. This gathering, convened roughly a half century after his death, marks only the second occasion on which his contributions have been systematically celebrated at Yale. The first was organized in 1967, two decades after his death. It generated a volume entitled Ten Economic Studies in the Tradition of Irving Fisher. All but one of the essays appearing in that work were written by members of the Yale Economics Department. The exception was a centennial appreciation prepared by Paul Samuelson, in which he saw fit to scold earlier generations of Yale economists for their failure to applaud the contributions to the discipline made by one of their own.

Discussion of the relationship between Fisher and his Yale contemporaries abounds with complexities. It may still be worth trying to unravel them. Such an exercise can throw instructive light on attributes of Fisher's style, on the academic culture of Yale in his day, and on the state of the art in American economics in the first half of this century.

I

Fisher and Yale in the 1880s

LET US BEGIN WITH a look at the Yale that Fisher encountered as a freshman in 1884. There had been revolutionary developments in American higher education in the post-Civil War decades--most notably, Harvard's decision under President Eliot to adopt an elective system and the launching of Johns Hopkins as an institution dedicated to postgraduate studies. At this time, Yale held out as a bastion of academic conservatism. The core of the institution, in the view of its administrative leadership, was Yale College, and top priority should properly be assigned to preserving its essentially lockstep curriculum. This involved compulsory studies of the ancient languages (Latin and Greek), mathematics, and the natural sciences, as well as some work in Biblical studies. The itemization of its curricular prescriptions afforded little room for modern subjects, though it had been standard practice for some time in the denominationally affiliated colleges (as Yale then was) for the president to lecture to seniors on themes in political economy. Just what that amounted to differed with the interests and tastes of the incumbent.

More by accident than by design, this peculiarity of the traditional pattern turned out to be a catalyst to some modest curricular reforms by the time Fisher arrived on the scene. The seeds of change were sown in 1872 when newly appointed President Porter--a Congregational clergyman, like all of his predecessors--elected to focus his required lectures to seniors on moral philosophy, metaphysics, and the "evidences of Christianity." The expected political economy component was then eligible to be spun off. To fill the empty space, Porter appointed William Graham Sumner, then an Episcopal minister in New Jersey, as a Professor of Political and Social Science. This was a remarkable turn of events. Sumner had no visible qualifications as a scholar in the social studies. He had done a stint of postgraduate study in Europe following his graduation from Yale in 1863, with attention primarily to church history and Biblical criticism. But he did possess what was then regarded as an essential qualification: he had the Yale blue in his blood.

Sumner's dynamism in the classroom soon attracted enthusiastic student audiences to political economy and prompted demands for more curricular space for this subject matter. Yale's administrators did their best at stonewalling. In the spring term, 1884--the semester before Fisher matriculated--Sumner and several faculty colleagues managed to break that resistance after sequestering the president in his office for several hours. As a result, half of the junior year and 80% of the senior year were liberated from requirements. These changes produced a dramatic increase in the demand for instruction in political economy. To satisfy it, three additions to the faculty with backgrounds in this subject matter were ultimately authorized. All appointees were graduates of Yale and each had done postgraduate work in German universities. (A word is in order about the individuals in this triumvirate. Two of its members--Henry W. Farnam, Yale B.A., 1874, and University of Strasbourg Ph.D., 1878, and Arthur T. Hadley, Yale B.A., 1876, with postgraduate study at the University of Berlin--had been eager to teach political economy before the curricular reform of 1884 afforded regular opportunity to do so. They had initially been obliged to settle for appointments as tutors in required subjects such as Latin and Greek. The third member--John C. Schwab, Yale B.A., 1886, University of Gottingen Ph.D., 1889--was the first to begin his teaching at Yale in the field of his preference.)