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davehershey's review
5.0
This short but dense book tells the history of the change in American universities between the Civil war and WWI. Prior to the Civil War, the goal of universities was the acquisition of knowledge, professors passed on that knowledge, universities were rooted in Christian presuppositions, and basically everyone took the same courses.
In the decades between 1870-1910, all of this began to change. In the natural sciences, specialization began to be more common. Rather than merely passing on knowledge, the goal shifted to the discovery of knowledge with an emphasis on original research. This contributed to a loosening of the idea that all subjects were unified and one complete story of knowledge could be told; instead professors focused on their own areas of research. Thus, moral philosophy, once the final class that tied everything together, began to disappear. The humanities attempted to step into the gap, but could not provide the unifying ideas moral philosophy once had.
It would be easy to see this process as some sort of attack on Christianity. Yet the authors show that many of the natural scientists continued to be people of faith. The difference was that rather than approaching scientific studies with the goal of proving the truth of faith, they approached it to discover new facts about the natural world. It was already common for more liberal Christians to shift their interpretation of the Bible to fit with scientific findings. But now, with specialization, scientists were able to compartmentalize their faith into a separate realm. In other words, they may have been churchgoers and believers, but they left these ideas at the door of the university. When pursuing science, they adhered to "methodological naturalism" with no constraints from faith.
There is so much more in this small book. The authors succeed in helping understand what changed universities from religious institutions prior to the Civil War to religiously neutral by WWI. A good read to go along with this would be George Marsden's work on fundamentalism, for that seems to be the next part of the story: as universities became secular and liberal Christians adapted faith to fit the new sciences, fundamentalists retreated into their own colleges. But that's another story...
I read this book because I work in Christian campus ministry and part of our new staff training is a bit of history about universities. This book is definitely going to supplement and sharpen the story we share with our new staff, for these changes a century ago contributed to the beginning of campus ministries as outside organizations as well as shaping the university we work on today.
In the decades between 1870-1910, all of this began to change. In the natural sciences, specialization began to be more common. Rather than merely passing on knowledge, the goal shifted to the discovery of knowledge with an emphasis on original research. This contributed to a loosening of the idea that all subjects were unified and one complete story of knowledge could be told; instead professors focused on their own areas of research. Thus, moral philosophy, once the final class that tied everything together, began to disappear. The humanities attempted to step into the gap, but could not provide the unifying ideas moral philosophy once had.
It would be easy to see this process as some sort of attack on Christianity. Yet the authors show that many of the natural scientists continued to be people of faith. The difference was that rather than approaching scientific studies with the goal of proving the truth of faith, they approached it to discover new facts about the natural world. It was already common for more liberal Christians to shift their interpretation of the Bible to fit with scientific findings. But now, with specialization, scientists were able to compartmentalize their faith into a separate realm. In other words, they may have been churchgoers and believers, but they left these ideas at the door of the university. When pursuing science, they adhered to "methodological naturalism" with no constraints from faith.
There is so much more in this small book. The authors succeed in helping understand what changed universities from religious institutions prior to the Civil War to religiously neutral by WWI. A good read to go along with this would be George Marsden's work on fundamentalism, for that seems to be the next part of the story: as universities became secular and liberal Christians adapted faith to fit the new sciences, fundamentalists retreated into their own colleges. But that's another story...
I read this book because I work in Christian campus ministry and part of our new staff training is a bit of history about universities. This book is definitely going to supplement and sharpen the story we share with our new staff, for these changes a century ago contributed to the beginning of campus ministries as outside organizations as well as shaping the university we work on today.
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