Abstract

"Colleges in Panic: How College Trustees Gambled with Native Land"

Dhananjaya Premauden, University of Pennsylvania (dhanprem@upenn.edu)

The Panics of 1819 and 1837 in the United States were profoundly disruptive to businesses, individuals, and governments. However, little research has examined how colleges participated in and responded to economic crises. Although early nineteenth-century colleges were small, trustees and college presidents had to demonstrate business acumen to ensure their colleges survived, especially as state and federal aid was often sparse. College trustees frequently bent the financial fates of their institutions by investing in land and bank stocks, as state and federal governments provided sparse aid. By examining colleges across the Trans-Appalachian West, such as the University of North Carolina and Ohio University, this paper examines how colleges endured and stumbled amid a combination of land speculation and investment. College trustees were often regional politicians and merchants who co-created corporations, towns, state institutions, and colleges and universities. They invested in a vision of a civilized frontier through Native land, which colleges would help maintain. As influential leaders, these trustees leveraged their prestige to seek the aggressive dispossession of Native American tribes through treaties, petitions to state and federal governments, and occasionally, war. The land they fought for could then be leased, sold, and rented to fund colleges, which, in turn, supported regional economies through buying services from across the region. Financial panics revealed both the luck and the recklessness of trustees making business decisions to keep these institutions afloat. Trustees responded in numerous ways, ousting old leadership, converting their colleges into seminaries or military colleges that were more “profitable,” and petitioning the federal and state governments for relief. This paper argues that colleges, like other early nineteenth-century businesses, were both victims and participants in panics, and college trustees’ short-term thinking brought institutional wealth and chaos to colleges at the cost of Native American lives and land.