The Making of the Modern University (review)

Julie A. Reuben. (1996). The Making of the Modern University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 363 pp. $18.95.

Reuben's book focuses on the American universities that emerged between 1870 and 1930 and upon their efforts to deliver moral education to their students. Before 1870, moral education had been an integral part of the curriculum of the American college. Having as their goal the training of ministers and civic leaders, these colleges looked to Christian Scriptures, the classics, and the Baconian style of inductive science as the ultimate authorities for both right thinking and right action. They believed that all knowledge could fit into a coherent framework shaped by Protestant Christian humanism. College leaders believed that the acquisition of knowledge had practical and moral, as well as cognitive, dimensions. This view was institutionalized in the curriculum in the senior-level course in moral philosophy. Such a view was consistent with the Western philosophical tradition and with the tradition of the Western university.

Reuben argues that, in the American university, the belief in the unity of knowledge, and the concomitant view that knowledge and morality are inseparable, disintegrated between 1870 and 1930. The development of the new natural sciences and the new social sciences, and the resulting curricular diversification, was the key to this transformation. These new disciplines shattered the unity of the old knowledge base and left students and faculty with no coherent foundation from which to engage in moral reflection. A major part of Reuben's thesis is that the leaders of the new universities did not intend to dispense with moral education, nor did they give up their belief in the unity of knowledge easily (if at all). Nonetheless, they failed to create a new synthesis that would have preserved the unity of knowledge and its connection to morality while at the same time incorporating the new knowledge and methods into the curriculum. As a consequence, the founders failed to "create new institutional forms that would embody their belief that truth incorporated all knowledge and was morally relevant" (p. 3).

Because Reuben wants to focus on the interactions between institutions and ideas, she quotes more from university presidents, deans, department heads, and "average" faculty members than from the "giants" in the history of ideas (p. 9). Reuben describes this approach as "middling" intellectual history (p. 8). By quoting from standard scholarly journals of the time, as well as "archival sources, annual reports, and course catalogues," she does a good job of charting how the actual shapers of institutions grappled with the issues of knowledge and morality (p. 10). One of the great benefits of this approach is her clarification of the point that most university reformers did not think in terms of a war between science and religion; rather, they sought reconciliation between the two. This point is highly significant because Reuben's book basically covers the period when Darwin's evolutionary ideas were causing "convulsions" in the American mind (Russett, 1976, p. 1). The camps of the militant rationalists and the fundamentalists were forming during this period, but Reuben demonstrates how the most prominent university reformers sought, in their curricular reforms and in their hiring of faculty, to steer a middle course between the two extremes. Reuben frequently mentions Charles Eliot of Harvard, Daniel C. Gilman of Johns Hopkins, and James B. Angell of the University of Michigan. Thus, Reuben helps to define the distinctive place of university culture within the spectrum of American high culture.

Reuben is at her best when describing how, and why, responsibility for teaching about morality kept shifting locations within the emerging university structure. When it became clear that the traditional senior course in moral philosophy would no longer be a central part of the curriculum, institutional leaders placed the responsibility for ethical education upon different departments and disciplines. Scholars in the new religious studies departments tried to fill the void at first, but since they emphasized the emotional...