The Books of My Life: The Making of the Modern University

 

Virtually ever since the modern university with its devotion to the scientific method, its various natural science, social science, arts and humanities departments, and professional schools, and its graduate programmes arose in late nineteenth century America, intellectuals who have written on the transformation from college to university, academics like Lawrence Veysey and Roger Geiger, have sought to understand why these new universities were so different from the antebellum and early 19th century college that preceded it and why they have dominated the American higher education environment ever since. Often these analyses were tinged with a sense of sorrow and of loss. George Marsden in his The Soul of the American University and other of his essays, James Turner in several of his works, and D.G. Hart in several of his works, seem to regret that the modern university did not put morals and religion at their heart as the old colleges supposedly did. So does Julie Reuben.

In The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) Julie Reuben has waded into the debate over why the differences between the old colleges, which put morals and religion at their heart, and the new universities which seemed not to. Like others before her Reuben explores how the new science, one grounded in evolution and change rather than Baconianism with its emphasis on observation, taxonomic classification, and the discovery of unchanging natural laws, aspects that made it easy at least initially for Protestants to harmonise science with Christian ideology. Reuben explores how this new science, a science which impacted everything in academia from Biblical Studies, to the natural sciences, and to the new social sciences, played a role in this transformation. Unlike earlier commentators who saw a more of a straight line between religious college and secular university, Reuben sees more circles and curves (something that is not necessarily a bad thing).

Reuben grounds her study of the transformation of American higher education in articles of academics,  and particularly in essays by university presidents in “popular" magazines like Popular Science Monthly (which she references extensively particularly in the early chapters of the book), Science, the Atlantic, in the new scholarly journals of the era including the American Journal of Sociology and Political Science Quarterly, in books, and in primary source material, particularly presidential records and university presidential reports. She focuses on eight universities, the two state universities of Michigan and California, and the private universities of Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and Stanford—three of the new universities that arose in the era—and Harvard, Yale, and Columbia—three old colleges that transformed themselves into universities. While Reuben focuses on these eight schools other universities make cameo appearances in the book including the universities of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Acadia (presumably the one in Pennsylvania and not the one in the Canadian Maritimes).

While not denying that evolution and modern biblical criticism did “secularise” American universities Reuben argues that the transformation from old college to new university was much more complex and nuanced that many other commentators on the transformation have it. Reuben argues that there were three ideal type stages in this transformation: the religious stage between 1880 and 1910, the science stage between 1900 to 1920, and the humanistic and extracurricular stage from 1915 to 1930. 

In the first stage according to Reuben, university reformers, who were part of what was essentially a social movement, tried to reconstruct a Christianity for the new scientific age. They opposed denominational control of the universities they were building seeing it as too dogmatic and close minded compared to the open and free inquiry ideology proffered by the new science. They saw sectarian colleges as inhibiting this free and open inquiry thanks to their hiring of members of their own denominations and the peer pressure at these colleges to follow the party line of the denomination that ran the college. 

Despite this scepticism about denominational colleges and the belief that such colleges limited freedom of inquiry, university reformers did not initially, according to Reuben, want to jettison religion or morals and moral education, or the notion that the study of everything together resulted in the unity of truth from the curriculum of the new universities. They believed that science and particularly evolutionary science with its emphasis on observation (their definition of objective) could be harmonised with Protestantism, Liberal Protestantism that is. This they attempted to do, claims Reuben.

By the early 20th century, Reuben argues, this effort at the harmonisation of evolutionary science and religion had failed. The evolutionary study of science (something that fed into the new biblical criticism which argued that the Bible developed rather than came fully formed out of nothing) led many to conclude, says Reuben, that scientific and religious “truth” differed and that the new science could not be harmonised with either the old or new adapted religion. Moreover, students at the new universities showed little interest in courses on religion studies scientifically or in religion itself. Finally, they concluded that religion had an emotional not an intellectual value.

While these reformers marginalised religion in the new universities they did not jettison moral education, secular moral education, from the curriculum, writes Reuben. They thought that moral education was essential for teaching students good personal habits including good hygiene, good character, and good citizenship (as they narrowly defined this).

By the early 20th century, writes Reuben, universities were in full departmental and specialisation mode. There were departments of natural science, departments of social science, and departments of the arts and humanities. The faculty, and particularly the new faculty, were now specialists in these various disciplines. There were, for instance, faculty members who specialised in some aspect of chemistry, physics, biology (which at one time saw itself as the scientific branch that could unify all the other disciplines), sociology, political economy, and literature. This fragmentation was, for them, progress, a progression toward greater and greater knowledge. At this point, writes Reuben, it was faculty in the arts and sciences who claimed the ability to unify all truth and to teach moral education to students if in a more impressionistic way than the natural and social sciences.

By the 1910s and 1920s, claims Reuben, the fragmentation of the sciences and the departmentalisation of knowledge led many university reformers to conclude that the unification of all scientific truth was impossible. University leaders attempted to stop this fragmentation by taking over college athletics, intramural and intercollegiate, from the students, building dormitories, and offering an array of services to students. For academic bureaucrats, says Reuben, this created a sense of school spirit and school community. Morality, writes Reuben, had now evolved into morale. The age of seemingly ever increasing academic bureaucracies and academic non-teaching bureaucrats was born.

Here endeth Reuben’s lesson on the decline of the old religious college and the rise of the modern secular university. This lesson adds some wrinkles to those of previous explorers of this transformation, specifically the tripartite stages of new university evolution and the claim that, at least in the first two stages, reformers did not want to jettison religion, specifically a Liberal Protestant Christianity which was harmonisable with evolutionary science. One can argue that they never did in fact jettison either religion or morals from the academic curriculum in that Liberal Protestantism was replaced by a kind of utopian religion of science and moral education became morale education, claims Reuben.

I quite liked Reuben's The Transformation of the Modern University. I found her argument quite compelling. That said, I did have a few but moments. Wouldn’t it have been helpful to add a few land grant state universities into the mix say Cornell, Michigan State, Ohio State, or Purdue? Was the secular revolution more “advanced” at those schools given their emphasis on science and particularly agricultural science? Shouldn’t there have been greater regional balance in the universities studied? No Southern or Intermountain West university found a place on Reuben’s study list. What was happening at Alabama and Alabama’s land grant school Auburn? What was happening at Texas or Texas’s land grant university, Texas A&M. What was happening at Utah, Utah’s land grant institution Utah State, or at BYU, a Mormon owned school that also taught agriculture? As for the sources, are they too skewed in the direction of academic leaders? And why was there no discussion of American anthropology, that mixture of evolutionary science and humanities cultural studies that, in its structure—biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeological anthropology, and cultural anthropology—claimed to be oriented toward a wholistic understanding of humans and their environments? Wholism institutionalised? Despite these buts I highly recommend Reuben's study of the rise of the new universities.