Frank Knight graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1913 with both a B.S. and an M.A. degree. He studied economics under future UT President James Hoskins and was elected to Phi Kappa Phi. Following graduation, Knight pursued doctoral studies in economics at Cornell University and completed his degree in 1916. His dissertation on the theory of business profits was called a masterpiece. Knight held teaching assignments at Cornell and Iowa before entering upon a long career at the University of Chicago, where he remained until 1960, teaching nine years more after his retirement in 1951.
At Chicago, Knight was a towering figure in the Economics Department, its foremost specialist in the history of economic thought and a major leader of the "Chicago School" which produced a large number of distinguished economists. Knight himself taught three future Nobel laureates. In 1950 Knight was elected president of the American Economic Association, and in 1957 it gave him its highest award, the Francis Walker Medal for lifetime achievement in economics, an award given only once every five years and discontinued when the Nobel Prize in economics was established. He was also elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received honorary doctorates from Princeton, Northwestern, Columbia, Rochester, Illinois, and the University of Glasgow. Knight died in Chicago on April 15, 1972.
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