Short answers, pulled from the story.
Francis Amasa Walker (the 2nd of July 1840 - the 5th of January 1897) was an American economist, statistician, educator, and Union Army officer. He served as the third president of MIT, superintendent of the 1870 and 1880 censuses, and inaugural president of the American Economic Association. He is credited with developing the residual theory of wage distribution.
Walker debunked the wage-fund doctrine and developed the residual theory of wage distribution, which later influenced John Bates Clark's marginal productivity theory. His textbook Political Economy, first published in 1883, was one of the most widely used economics texts of the nineteenth century. Robert Solow appraised the third edition (1888) as representing the state of the art of economics at the time.
The Francis A. Walker Medal was a quinquennial lifetime achievement award given by the American Economic Association, first presented in 1947. Recipients included Wesley Clair Mitchell (1947), John Maurice Clark (1952), Frank Knight (1957), Jacob Viner (1962), Alvin Hansen (1967), Theodore Schultz (1972), and Simon Kuznets (1977). The award was discontinued in 1982 after the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences made it superfluous.
Walker served in the 15th Massachusetts Infantry, rising to the rank of brevet brigadier general. At Chancellorsville in May 1863, an exploding shell shattered his left hand and wrist. On the 25th of August 1864, Confederate forces captured him at the Second Battle of Ream's Station; he was held at Libby Prison in Richmond before being released in an October 1864 prisoner exchange.
Walker served as MIT president from 1881 until his death in 1897. During his tenure, enrollment grew from 302 to 1,198 students, faculty quadrupled from 38 to 156, and the endowment grew thirteenfold to $1.798 million. He secured a total of $1.6 million in Massachusetts state grants and launched new programs including electrical engineering (1882), chemical engineering (1888), and naval architecture (1893).
Walker published influential arguments for racial immigration restriction, describing immigrants from Austria-Hungary, Italy, and the Russian Empire in terms historian Mae Ngai identified as foundational to modern American nativism. He also promoted social Darwinism and eugenics. A bronze bust of Walker was removed from its pedestal at MIT and relocated to the MIT Museum in 2022, accompanied by a description calling his views "appalling."