Dr. Buchanan received the MA from UT in 1941 after receiving the bachelor’s degree from Middle Tennessee State Teachers’ College (now MTSU). After receiving the PhD from the University of Chicago in 1948, he joined the UT faculty as associate professor of economics. He left UT in 1951 to accept the headship of the Department of Economics at Florida State University, where he remained until 1956.
He became head of the Economics Department at the University of Virginia and became director (in 1957) of a new research institute—Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy. The purpose of the center was to offer an alternative to what Buchanan saw as the increasingly technical nature of economics and to promote research in a “social order based on individual liberty.” This area of research became known as “public choice theory.”
In 1966 Buchanan became interested in returning to UT, but Academic Vice President Herman Spivey rejected the recommendation that Buchanan be employed because his salary requirements exceeded UT’s capabilities and his demand for a university-wide professorship was problematic. Buchanan went instead to VPI and then in 1983 from VPI to George Mason University. In 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, an award that sparked some controversy about the depth and value of his work.
In addition to the Nobel award, Buchanan has been the recipient of the Seidman Award of the American Economics Association (1984) and honorary doctorates from the University of Giessen (1982), the University of Zurich (1984), George Mason University (1987), the New University of Lisbon (1987), Ball State University (1988), and the City University of London (1988). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a past president of the Southern Economics Association and Western Economics Association. He was the first UT alumnus to be awarded a Nobel Prize. He was inducted into the Alumni Academic Hall of Fame in 1994.