This work is nothing less than a comprehensive reinterpretation of the transformation of higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Julie A. Reuben takes as her focus the fracturing of the nineteenth-century faith in the unity of truth by a series of developments that ultimately led intellectuals to associate truth with value-free science and social science and to relegate moral questions to the margins of intellectual life in the university. In the process of telling this story, Reuben illuminates a broad range of intellectual, cultural, and organizational changes that together created a distinctly modern university.
Reuben sees the transformation of higher education as the ironic result of efforts of intellectuals and educational leaders to preserve a place for morality while trying to accommodate the needs of both science and economic development. The process unfolded in three stages: 1) From roughly 1880 to 1910, educators tried to make religion and science compatible by reforming religion, moving away from narrow denominational positions, and promoting a scientific study of religion. 2) From 1900 to 1920, they discarded the centrality of religion and tried to establish secular sources of morality, with many believing that science itself would promote social reform and preserve traditional moral values. 3) From roughly 1915 to 1930, as scientists grew insistent on the value-free nature of their enterprise, educators worked to create a place for morality in the humanities and in the extracurriculum.
Reuben argues that the split between truth and morality was effectively codified in the 1930s by logical positivism, which proclaimed the meaninglessness of value statements in science and social science, and by emotivist ethics, which emphasized the emotional rather than the cognitive dimension of ethical decisions. From the first, however, Reuben believes that the separation of knowledge and morality has bred a kind of uneasiness among academics, an uneasiness that is now beginning to surface powerfully in "disciplines ranging from the philosophy and history of science to postmodern literary criticism" (p. 268).
Reuben's sweeping study does not replace two other monumental works on the transformation of higher education, but it does take issue with them on important matters. Reuben disputes Laurence R. Veysey's claim in The Emergence of the American University (1965) that ideals of research, utility, and liberal cultural competed with each other; instead, she argues, educators believed in all three ideals and tried to find a place for each of them in the modern university. Reuben finds less fault in George Marsden's The Soul of the American University (1994) but offers a subtly different account of secularization, one that focuses less on the rise of liberal Protestantism than on the failed effort to make religion and science compatible.
Reuben will be faulted by some for making sweeping claims about higher education on the basis of a fairly narrow institutional focus (she studies only eight major research universities). Such an approach inevitably leaves many important stories untold. Yet Reuben is interested primarily in capturing the cutting edge of educational developments, and she has managed to do this magnificently. This is an extraordinary piece of scholarship -conceptually rich, wonderfully documented, gracefully written, and very likely to become a classic in both educational and intellectual history.