The Sacred & the Secular University (review)

In The Sacred & the Secular University, Jon Roberts and James Turner trace the change in the relationship between American colleges and universities and their Christian traditions. This transformation had its origins in the intellectual changes occurring roughly between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War. According to Roberts and Turner, it was academic specialization, not intentional secularization, that led American higher education to drift away from its Protestant moorings.

Roberts, in his section on the sciences, shows how scientists who had understood their study as revealing the works of God became, over the course of the nineteenth century, increasingly involved in investigations rooted in methodological naturalism. This meant that explanations of observed data would be formulated in terms of natural, rather than supernatural, phenomena; the success of scientific methodology meant that scientists required less recourse to God as a final explanation. With natural causation a central part of the scientific method, questions regarding the world that had previously been answered with reference to God had become part of a commitment to ongoing scientific inquiry and intellectual progress. The success of the sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century led scholars to extend the scientific method to the study of human behavior, resulting in the rise of the human sciences, further extending methodological naturalism into new academic disciplines and further marginalizing the place of theology in the scheme of scientific explanation.

In the second part of the book, Turner focuses on the rise of the humanities. Traditionally, the humanities meant the study of Latin and Greek grammar as the foundation for an education that built up to the study of moral philosophy and theology; by 1870, the humanities entailed a focus on arts, literature, and history. The humanities prospered in the collegiate curriculum because of the enfeeblement of classical education in the face of a society more concerned with understanding the changes in the modern world than with preserving the traditional canon. Also, with religion increasingly isolated by scholarly compartmentalization, higher education was in danger of losing its moral purpose. The humanities disciplines provided a new justification for education by offering as their goal the production of a cultivated, civilized youth who had learned to appreciate and recognize Truth, Beauty, and the Good. This vague spiritualism, as it dethroned the predominantly Protestant tradition as the foundation of higher education, allowed other religions present in a multicultural America to find their place in higher education.

While the main thrust of The Sacred & the Secular University is to address the process of secularization (and its limits) within the American system of higher education, it also provides some historical context for those studying the development of library science in the United States. Unfortunately, neither Roberts nor Turner provides much insight into the broader historical milieu that must have influenced the thought processes of academics as they engaged in scientific studies or argued for revamping and expanding the curriculum; their focus is firmly on the workings of colleges and universities. While a broader study would have been more satisfying and more complete, their story of secularization and the changes in the higher education curriculum is one worth reading. This book offers any student of the history of academic libraries a useful and pleasantly readable guide to the intellectual and curricular changes in American colleges and universities in the latter part of the nineteenth century.