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A “Dying Light” or a Newborn Enlightenment: Religion and Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Mark Schwehn
Mark Schwehn*
Affiliation:
Valparaiso University and Christ College
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Extract

During the 1980s, when I first began to study the nature and the history of higher education in the United States, I relied quite heavily upon Laurence R. Veysey's The Emergence of the American University, Given my own particular interests, as much personal as they were professional, in the relationship between religion and higher learning, I found myself constantly returning to Veysey in preference to other syntheses for a densely textured, lucidly written, always thoughtful account of the change from a largely Christian network of mid-nineteenth century colleges to a system of higher education dominated by the secular research university. Veysey's account has by now been largely superseded, especially after the 1980s, in part by histories that, unlike Veysey's, maintain close attention to religion, both during the period that he focused upon and beyond it up to at least the period during which he wrote his book (the 1960s). Even so, both in its details and in its overall design, The Emergence of the American University has proven to be remarkably durable, some of it quite prescient, and I believe that it can still be profitably used to consider what positive role, if any, religion might play in strengthening the character of higher education in the United States today.

Type
Retrospective: Laurence R. Veysey's The Emergence of the American University
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , Fall 2005 , pp. 454 - 460
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965/1970), 12.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., 12; 257.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., 11.Google Scholar

4 Reuben, Julie A. The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 12.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 88–132.Google Scholar

6 One example is Hart, D.G. “Faith and Learning in the Age of the University: The Academic Ministry of Daniel Coit Gilman,“ in Marsden, George and Longfield, Bradley J. eds., The Secularization of the Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 107–145.Google Scholar

7 For her own elegant summary of portions of the argument of Making of the Modern University, see Julie Reuben, “The University and its Discontents,” Hedgehog Review, 2:3 (Fall 2000), 72–83.Google Scholar

8 Marsden, George The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); James Tunstead Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. Eerdmans, 1998).Google Scholar

9 Among the most incisive early treatments of this complicated subject is David A. Hollinger, “Money and Academic Freedom a Half-Century after McCarthyism: Universities amid the Force Fields of Capital,” in Hollingsworth, P. G. ed., Unfettered Expression (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). A more recent and extended treatment of this subject is Derek Bok, Universities in the Market Place: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).Google Scholar

10 Marsden, Soul of the American University, 411.Google Scholar

11 Hollinger, David A. “Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century,“ in Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century Intellectual History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 17–41.Google Scholar

12 The most comprehensive history of Catholic higher education in the twentieth century is Philip Gleason, Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

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