I first read The Emergence of the American University as a graduate student nearly twenty years ago while contemplating writing a dissertation on patronage and the post-1945 university. I have consulted it innumerable times since, and I remain impressed by its ambitious scope, careful research, and elegant prose. Lawrence R. Veysey did his doctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1950s and early 1960s and I have always wondered if his interest in the history of the university stemmed from the changes that occurred on campuses in the years after World War II. As he acknowledged in footnotes, Veysey knew about such postwar developments as the creation of semiautonomous research institutes; although he did not mention it, he surely was aware that the federal government had become a significant new patron of the postwar university. But according to Veysey, the structure of the American university, its relations of power and the ideas that animated it had been set by 1910 and did not vary significantly after that. By that time, leading universities embodied elements from each of the four intellectual strands that Veysey argued had vied for institutional dominance at the turn of the twentieth century: utilitarianism, “pure” research, liberal culture, and mental discipline. They had become, according to Veysey, institutional hodgepodges. On any American campus could be found “pockets of excitement over research, islands of devotion to culture, and segments of adherence to the aim of vocational service,” Veysey wrote, and any institution's budget might include “boathouses, landscaping, student housing, and gymnasiums as well as “book purchases and library construction.”
