I have spent a godawful amount of time on planes this week, going to Malawi and back for a meeting concerning the African Centres of Excellence project.  It’s given me a lot of time to catch up on reading (two recommendations for African fiction: The Grub Hunter by Amir Tag Elser is good, but Woman of the Ashes by Mia Couto is great). 

But one book in particular I thought I should mention to y’all is The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality  by Julie A. Reuben.  It is a very interesting work which crosses intellectual history with the history of universities (this is rarer than you’d think) to describe the morphing of the American concept of higher education from one of morals and character education in the Civil War period, to something like the research university ideal we have today by the 1920s.  Turns out this is actually a rather complicated journey – more so than many of the main works of US higher education like those of Frederick Rudolph and John Thelin tend to suggest.

Basically, the story runs like this: prior to the Civil War, higher education in the US was thought of unambiguously as an affair of moral education.  It was the formation of men’s characters (there were some women’s colleges at this point, but they were pretty rare) that was at stake.  However, from the 1860s onwards, science became an increasingly important component of higher education in the United States.  This is usually portrayed as something exogenous, forced on universities by a combination of economic growth/progress and enlightened public policy in the form of the Morrill Act.  But Reuben suggests another reason: that it was the growing rift between science and religion, driven in large part by the controversy around Darwin’s theories, which forced a major re-think of what universities were for.    At that point, it was not quite as simple as science vs. religion – most scientists were quite prepared to accept the idea that science and religion could co-exist reasonably happily.  Rather, within what would eventually become known as the Humanities there was a drastic reduction in deference to established religion.  Religious courses increasingly became “scientific” courses offering criticism of the Bible as history of literature, and – more generally – institutions began replacing religion with ethics as the source of a moral education.

Crucially, moral education remained at the centre of American higher education into the early twentieth century, even as science began to make ever greater inroads into the academy.  Both subjects like biology and the emerging social sciences were keen to portray themselves as deeply moral subjects, precisely because their results could be applied to society in a progressive way (though, crucially, they did not always define progress the way we do; eugenics, for instance, was one of the more prominent ways this “science” was applied).  And, basically, all the subjects which adhered to the trinity of applied = progressive = moral, also believed that ultimately there was something akin to the “unity of knowledge”.  According to Reuben, it was the desire to maintain some semblance of the unity of knowledge across an ever-burgeoning number of disciplines that begat the elective system we still have today.

The problem was that the drift towards specialized scientific research eventually began to blow all this apart.  A view for the “purity” of science pushed back against the notion of science being progressive in favour of it being objective and neutral.  Social Sciences followed suit.   Pretty soon “truth and objectivity” supplanted “morality and progressiveness” as ideals of the university.   Professors in many fields began explicitly divorcing the quest for truth from the desire to shape students’ morals.  Perhaps not coincidentally, that gave them a reason argue for more time doing research and less time teaching.   Since having great men of science on your staff was already the key to institutional prestige, universities more or less acquiesced in this shift. 

Staff in the humanities, interestingly, did not.  They still tended to focus on the moral angle of higher education (even if the gradual fading of religion meant they no longer had quite the same basis to judge moral claims), and placed more emphasis on teaching.  By the end of the twentieth century, this distinction had decayed somewhat, but it is certainly true that by the early 1920s the “two cultures” had very different professional orientations, along with different conceptions of how truth and morality fit together.

But here’s the interesting thing: despite the fact that its dominant disciplines had more or less decided to punt on the whole moral education thing, universities themselves could not bring themselves to do the same.  In a sense, their place in society depended on their ability to claim a status of “turning young people into citizens”.   But if they couldn’t get their teachers to do it in the classroom, how were they going to do it?  Answer: by conjuring into existence the entire apparatus known as “student affairs”. 

Deans of students were appointed.  Student housing – the better to keep an eye on students and guide them a bit through residence dons – were built.  Extra-curricular activities were introduced and, in the case of sports – highly regulated after 1905 and the creation of the NCAA.  Student advising was invented and then (later) professionalized.   None of this was considered necessary in the 1870s because moral development was professors’ jobs.  By the 1920s, professors had re-defined their job description so that very little of this was their concern, and rather than abandon the field altogether, universities back-filled with a whole new bureaucracy (which, a century later, the professoriate would complain about incessantly, but that’s another story).  Indeed, when none of this worked entirely as intended – students didn’t seem to be growing more moral over time – top universities began screening students for “character” and “morality” through application essays and the like.  This, of course, also gave top universities an excuse to start excluding Jews, but this too is another story (well told in Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen: the Hidden History of Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton). Reuben’s work focuses on just a handful of institutions – Yale, Harvard, Michigan and the like.  The transformation she is talking about in her book took time to spread around the anglophone world.  In Canada most of this shift would not occur until after World War I and in some places not until the 1960s (if you read Peter Kent’s The Invention of Academic Freedom: the 1968 Strax Affair at the University of New Brunswick you can see the dying embers of professors imagining pastoral care to be the central element of their jobs).  But it did eventually happen everywhere, and Reuben’s book – especially the final chapter, which mind-bogglingly good – is a thorough explanation of the way the academy justified the shift to itself.