America's sprawling system of colleges and universities has been built on the ruins of war. After the American Revolution the cash-strapped central government sold land grants to raise revenue and build colleges and schools in newly conquered lands. During the Civil War, the federal government built on this earlier precedent when it passed the…

In this paper, the author examines the content of Laurence Veysey's subsequent scholarship--centered upon his career-long fascination with the "price structure" of American society and institutions. Veysey's first scholarly volume after The Emergence of the American University was Law and Resistance: American Attitudes toward Authority (1970).…