In the widely disseminated Harvard report General Education in a Free Society (1945), the authors of the section on science teaching in the schools made passing reference to the portrayal of the scientific method in the existing curriculum. Rather than simply noting its inadequacy in representing the process of scientific research, they could not resist the urge to deliver a more scathing commentary. “Nothing could be more stultifying, and, perhaps more important, nothing is further from the procedure of the scientist,” they insisted, “than a rigorous tabular progression through the supposed ‘steps' of the scientific method, with perhaps the further requirement that the student not only memorize but follow this sequence in his attempt to understand natural phenomena.” This indictment was followed in 1951 by similar comments from Harvard president James B. Conant in his book Science and Common Sense. Conant's criticism of what he called the “alleged scientific method,” seemed to resonate with interested readers of the time. The eminent wartime research director Vannevar Bush, writing in the Saturday Review, praised him for making it “crystal clear that there is no such thing as the scientific method.” “The elegant definition of the scientific method that we have read for years,” he noted approvingly, “comes in for the dissection it has long needed.” Another reviewer hailed Conant's “service to the community [in] briefing the busy citizen on the way in which science really works,” noting also that he had “effectively demolished] conventional twaddle about the scientific method.”

Charles T. Loram was an important proponent of fashioning African education in ways that would best meet the needs of the colonial system. In the 1920s, Loram championed adapting the colonial curriculum away from “bookishness” towards a manual and agricultural orientation in order to meet the “needs” of rural Africans, as white settlers defined them. As his ideas on adaptation matured, Loram wrote an influential book, The Education of the South African Native in 1917, in which he stated: “On the necessity of industrial training for the Natives of South Africa there is remarkable unanimity. Government commissions and officials, missionaries and students of the Native Question, and the general public all agree that industrial training should be made the chief end of Native education.” What is interesting about this statement is the certainty with which Loram attributed consensus on the question of industrial training to all white colonial interest groups. Loram claimed “unanimity” in order to strengthen his argument for the particular form of industrial education that he favored. Yet, even though colonial actors ostensibly agreed on the need for “industrial education,” they lacked a common definition of “industrial education” which raises the question: were they agreeing to the same thing?

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Laurence R. Veysey's The Emergence of the American University. Hailed by Frederick Rudolph at the time of its release as a “major contribution … tough-minded … [and] brilliant.” Veysey's work is still widely read, taught, and cited. Every scholar who wrestles with the historical development of the modern American university must at some point come to terms with the institution as Veysey so brashly conceived of it. All disciplinary subfields have their founding text—a singular work that defines an entire intellectual discourse and lays out the “rules of the game” for all those who follow. For historians interested in tracking the organization, production, and consumption of knowledge in the United States, The Emergence of the American University is and remains that text.

Larry Veysey was my colleague and friend at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) for almost twenty years. We shared a common fascination with Utopias past and present; we talked often; and we taught several graduate seminars together. Though Larry never aspired to be anyone's mentor, I learned much from him about intellectual history. He was a complex individual—a difficult and at times infuriating colleague but also a loyal and generous friend and a person of extraordinary intelligence and at times alarming bluntness. In faculty meetings he never failed to speak his mind, and he could rarely resist baiting and provoking colleagues with whom he disagreed. But he also remained a tireless, fair-minded, and thoroughly conscientious participant in search committees, for which he compiled detailed, carefully nuanced evaluations of the leading candidates, often with grades attached. He also graded sunsets arid dinners. He appeared to be intransigent and set in his ways, but he believed in change and relished risk-taking. He loved to walk near the edge of the cliff, pushing and testing himself.

I wandered into the history of universities through a side door. I went to graduate school to study intellectual history. In my second year, I decided to write a seminar paper on changing ideas about the nature of religion but wanted to avoid the abstractness of traditional history of ideas. Looking for some more “concrete” way of documenting change in ideas than the analysis of individual thinkers allowed, I decided somewhat arbitrarily to “ground” my study in the history of universities. I do not recall even thinking about universities as related to the production of knowledge but rather viewed them as a convenient social institution in which one could find changing practices of religion.

In The Emergence of the American University, Laurence R. Veysey enriched our understanding of the American university at its creation in the second half of the nineteenth century. He demonstrated how this new institution drew on German approaches and valued experimental, empirical methods of knowledge. The university introduced the lecture and seminar. It valued graduate school training above all; the doctoral dissertation required that its students become creators of new knowledge, preferably by experimental methods. Veysey helped us understand the emerging American university by creating a useful ideal type.

In 1979, fourteen years after publishing his landmark work, The Emergence of the American University, Laurence R. Veysey wrote a forward-looking article for the American Quarterly tided “The Autonomy of American History Reconsidered.” In this article, he suggested that the time had come to rewrite American history from a more international point of view. “The increasing global awareness of our age enables us to view national differences with a new sophistication,” he observed in terms that now seem remarkably prescient:

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.”

I first encountered Laurence Veysey as an undergraduate at Pennsylvania State University in the early 1990s. I did not meet Veysey, who had long since left the academy. Nor did I read The Emergence of the American University’, which happened years later in graduate school. Actually, my first contact with Laurence R. Veysey occurred without me knowing it.

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.