Rueben, Julie. Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

== Summary ==
Julie
Reuben examines the interaction between institutional and intellectual change
and argues that the rejection of the “broad conception” (encompassing knowledge
and morality) was tied to the changes in educational and scholarly practices at
the turn of the 20th century. She converts the “triumph” of
scientific research into a problematic by showing how ‘unbiased’ scientific
research led to a loss in the universities’ ethical and moral purposes. By the
1930s, ‘value-free’ science had pushed the moral and ethical purposes of the
university to the marginalized humanities and, even more consistently, to the
extra-curriculum and administration of ‘student life’. The term “truth” thus no
longer “encompassed factual knowledge and moral values.” (2) This book examines
the intellectual transformation and marginalization of morality in higher
education, “from the nineteenth century broad conception of truth to the
twentieth-century division between facts and values.” (p. 2) The new conception
of knowledge, which emphasized empirically verifiable knowledge, drew on a
sharp distinction between “facts” and “values.” Moral and spiritual values
could not be objectively verified. The university, from the 1880s to the 1930s,
experienced three overlapping stages of reform to reconcile the loss of its
moral and ethical purposes. Religious reform (1880-1910) attempted to make the
study of religion scientific and objective, but in the end, it affirmed
religion’s intellectual marginality. Scientific reform (1910-1920) attempted to
encourage good personal habits just as much as liberal Christianity, better
knowledge would produce better people. This approach, however, failed by the
twentieth century as biological and social scientists argued that the
information yielded was practical knowledge, not of moral value. The last
reform efforts, Humanistic and Extracurricular (1915-1930) based their claims
“to service on their direct moral influence on students” (verse practical
knowledge of the sciences) (p. 7). The result of this intellectual
transformation, Reuben argues, was similar to religion. “Just as religion had
been dissociated from ‘cognitive’ truth, morality became divorced from
‘factual’ knowledge and aligned instead with ‘fictive’ and ‘aesthetic’ truth.
The good, then, became associated with the beautiful, not the true” (p. 7) This
form of “knowledge” affected how institutions operated and how faculty
“pursued” knowledge. Reuben writes, these new conceptions of knowledge “associated
agreement with intellectual progress” and “discouraged professors from engaging
in controversial moral issues” (p. 3-4) It also led to over-specialization,
rather than intellectual synthesis.