A “Dying Light” or a Newborn Enlightenment: Religion and Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century
During the 1980s, when I first began to study the nature and the history of higher education in the United States, I relied quite heavily upon Laurence R. Veysey's The Emergence of the American University, Given my own particular interests, as much personal as they were professional, in the relationship between religion and higher learning, I found myself constantly returning to Veysey in preference to other syntheses for a densely textured, lucidly written, always thoughtful account of the change from a largely Christian network of mid-nineteenth century colleges to a system of higher education dominated by the secular research university. Veysey's account has by now been largely superseded, especially after the 1980s, in part by histories that, unlike Veysey's, maintain close attention to religion, both during the period that he focused upon and beyond it up to at least the period during which he wrote his book (the 1960s). Even so, both in its details and in its overall design, The Emergence of the American University has proven to be remarkably durable, some of it quite prescient, and I believe that it can still be profitably used to consider what positive role, if any, religion might play in strengthening the character of higher education in the United States today.