Now, more than two generations later, the world of higher learning is a very different place indeed from the genteel and gentlemanly preserve more typical of A. Lawrence Lowell's Harvard or James Rowland Angell's Yale.
Active participants provide internal perspectives on the intellectual changes in their fields.
The trend toward increasing scientific rigor in many disciplines. Economics, for example, left behind the critical, often descriptive analysis of capitalism for the analytical rigor of mathematical modeling and empirical testing. Similarly, political science came to emphasize statistical method and formal rational-choice theories. The changing composition of the scholarly community. Once largely the preserve of Protestant upper-class males, undergraduate and graduate courses in the social sciences began to receive students from other ethnic, religious, and social backgrounds.