Francis Amasa Walker (July 2, 1840 – January 5, 1897) was an American economist, statistician, journalist, educator, academic administrator, and military officer in the Union Army.
Walker served on the editorial staff of the Springfield Republican in 1868, was the Chief of the Bureau of Statistics from 1869 to 1870 and Superintendent of the 1870 and 1880 censuses.[1] He was the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1871, a chief member of the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition, American representative to the 1878 International Monetary Conference, President of the American Statistical Association in 1882, and President of the American Economic Association in 1886.[2]
In 1872 he joined Yale University’s Sheffield Scientific School as a professor of political economy and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1878.[2] Walker was named president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1881, a position which he held for fifteen years until his death.[2] MIT’s Walker Memorial Hall, a former students’ clubhouse and one of the original buildings on the Charles River campus, was dedicated to him in 1916.
Walker was born in Boston, Massachusetts on July 2, 1840, the youngest son of Hanna (née Ambrose) and Amasa Walker, a prominent economist and state politician. The Walkers had three children, Emma (born 1835), Robert (born 1837), and Francis.[3] Because the Walkers’ next-door neighbor was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the junior Walker and junior Holmes were playmates as young children and renewed their friendship later in life.[4] The family moved from Boston to North Brookfield, Massachusetts in 1843 and remained there. As a boy he had both a noted temper as well as a magnetic personality.[5]
Walker as a young adult.
Walker began his schooling at the age of seven, studying Latin at various private and public schools in Brookfield before being sent to the Leicester Academy when he was twelve.[6] He completed his college preparation by the time he was fourteen and spent another year studying Greek and Latin under the future suffragist and abolitionist Lucy Stone before entering Amherst College at the age of fifteen.[6][7] Although he had planned to matriculate at Harvard after his first year at Amherst, Walker’s father believed his son was too young to enter the larger college and insisted he remain at Amherst. While he had entered with the class of ‘59, Walker became ill during his first year there and fell back a year. He was a member of the Delta Kappa and Athenian societies as a freshmen, joined and withdrew from Alpha Sigma Phi as a sophomore on account of “rowdyism”, and finally joined Delta Kappa Epsilon.[8][9] As a student, Walker was awarded the Sweetser Essay Prize and the Hardy Prize for extemporaneous speaking.[10] Walker graduated in 1860 as Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in law.[11] After graduation, Walker joined the law firm of Charles Devens and George Frisbie Hoar in Worcester, Massachusetts.[6]
