The Books of My Life: The Soul of the American University

Humans are, as well as being economic, political, geographic, and biological animals, cultural and meaning giving animals as George Marsden's The Soul of the American University (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) makes abundantly clear. Marsden's book, which places cultural history at its centre, explores how American colleges, once dominated by sectarian Protestant groups like the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, became, by the twentieth century, universities where "secularism" (or better the sacralisation of certain meanings) rather than Protestantism became the established "faith". 

Marsden argues that the seeds of secular establishment and Protestant disestablishment lay in evangelical Protestantism, the form of Protestantism that dominated American colleges, itself. As evangelicalism confronted the children of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment such as evolutionary Darwinism and evolutionary and historically oriented "higher" biblical criticism, evangelicalism split into the more "traditionalist", at least in self perception, conservative evangelicalism and moderate and liberal and even socialistic evangelicalism. This more moderate and liberal evangelicalism, claims Marsden, created a brand of Protestantism that adapted to and adopted Darwinism, adapted to and adopted "higher" biblical criticism, and tied mission to ethical and moral development and advocacy activism. Over time, the Protestant character of all of these was demagicified or secularised creating the modern university, a modern university shorn of its once dominant WASP Protestant heritage.

Though Marsden seems to place most of the blame for university "secularisation" on science and pragmatism and on academics, reality is a bit more complicated than that as Marsden seems to sometimes realise. Faculty did, as Marsden notes, come to place free speech and free inquiry (autonomy) at the heart of the faculty enterprise. It is not the faculty, however, who ran or who run American universities. As Thorstein Veblen noted in his The Higher Learning in America of 1918 it is capitalist economic interests with their practical need for trained workers and for technocrats who, through university Boards and university administrators, really control and run America's universities. Today, the dominance of universities by economic interests and their fellow travellers who fetishise a particular economic ideology that has been dehistoricised and who worship the holy trinity of Mammon, Greed, and Managerial Professionalism, has provided American universities with a corporate model of governance, a corporate model of corporate planning (the planning is our plan mentality), and a corporate retail model of education where the customer, those consumers universities are trying to attract and maintain, students, are almost always right.

Beyond empirical issues there are problems associated with the normative aspects of Marsden's book. In the concluding chapter to The Soul of the American University, "Concluding Unscientific Postscript", Marsden goes all normative on us calling for and advocating a return of religion, and particularly Christianity, to the ivy covered groves of academe. Using postmodernism in the same way Mormon intellectuals do, Marsden takes a postmodernist approach arguing that if tolerance and diversity are truly central to the academic and intellectual enterprise religion too should be tolerated in a university environment that preaches the gospel of diversity.

There are, of course, several problems with such an argument. In an age where the Bircher/Dixiecrat anti-intellectual and inquisitional variety of Protestantism in both its religious and "secular" form has taken over the Republican Party should universities, with their emphasis on facts and valid approaches to empirical facts (economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic methods and strategies), allow such hate filled paranoid and conspiracy driven perversions of reality to enter the academic playing field? Should those intolerant of any views other than their own and who have made demonic inquisition central to their ideologies and practises be allowed into the halls of academe? Marsden implies they shouldn't arguing instead for the creation of Habermasian like boards of experts who adjudicate what varieties of religion are acceptable on college campuses along with the need for religious groups themselves to agree to certain broad rules of the academic game. Marsden, in other words, accepts that universities should and must have standards and those that violate such standards should not gain admission into university halls. Moreover, as Marsden notes, religious organisations are already present on university campuses. University campuses are full of religious oriented groups that students can join and find community and friendship at if they so wish (see, for example, Conrad Cherry, Betty DeBerg, and Amanda Porterfield, Religion on Campus, 2001). I, for instance, used to go to Hillel periodically when I was a student though less for religious reasons than for community and friendship. If students are not availing themselves of such opportunities is that the fault of "secular" universities or, for example, the fact that many of these religious groups are intolerant of and inquisitorial towards a number of empirically grounded political, economic, and cultural ideologies? Finally, one can and should question whether corporations, like universities, are "persons" with souls.

Now don't get me wrong, I quite like the structure of the University of Toronto, where I was admitted, with its three postgraduate theological colleges and its three religious based federated religious colleges that are part of the public University of Toronto (Canada has taken a different approach to the separation of religion and state than the US). I wouldn't mind if this structure was replicated in the United States and Marsden notes that there were attempts to replicate the Canadian model in the US and that they had limited long term success. It must be remembered, however, that the history of English Canada is different from that of the US and this is one reason religious colleges are affiliated with or federated with public and private universities in Canada. It also must be remembered that a "secular" curriculum is at the core of the federated colleges at the UofT--and should also be if the Canadian system is copied in the US, on the primary, secondary, or higher education level--and that, as D.S. Masters noted in his book on Protestant church colleges in Canada, such federation and affiliation played a major role in "secularising" church colleges in Canada. In Marsden's terms, I suppose, this brings us back to square one once again where we don't seem to be able to pass go. It brings us back to square one for when change occurs, as it, historically speaking, always does, religion adapts to this change and adopts aspects of these changes as both the history of Protestant liberalism and Protestant reactionism well show.