The making of the modern university
Subtitle: intellectual transformation and the marginalization of morality
By: Julie A. Reuben.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press; University Of Chicago Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Chicago
Language: eng
Number of pages: 363
Subjects: Universities and colleges -- United States -- History -- 19th century; Universities and colleges -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Education, Higher -- United States -- Philosophy; Educational change -- United States -- History; Moral education -- United States -- History
Description: What is the purpose of higher education, and how should we pursue it? Debates over these issues raged in the late nineteenth century as reformers introduced a new kind of university - one dedicated to free inquiry and the advancement of knowledge. In the first major study of moral education in American universities. Julie Reuben examines the consequences of these debates for modern intellectual life.

Based on extensive research at eight universities - Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Stanford, Michigan, and California at Berkeley - Reuben examines the aims of university reformers in the context of nineteenth-century ideas about truth. She argues that these educators tried to apply new scientific standards to moral education, but that their modernization efforts ultimately failed.

By exploring the complex interaction between institutional and intellectual change, Reuben enhances our understanding of the modern university, the secularization of intellectual life, and the association of scientific objectivity with value-neutrality.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 271-344) and index.