Julie Reuben’s The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual transformation and the Marginalization of Morality is as important a volume in the history of higher education as you will likely find.  The central thesis is the movement in higher education that, largely due to the imposing force of scientific rationalism, pushed the moral component of the curriculum from a central place in the classroom, to the margins of the institution in student affairs.  Reuben traces this development in undoubtedly the greatest period of higher education transformation between 1880 and 1920.

This marginalization of morality also encompasses the fracture between fact and value.  This results in the division of faculty into specialized departments where research aims take the key position.  In response to this, she traces developments in humanities and other administrative options to re-integrate value into the curriculum through extra-curricular activities, student groups, and the goal of the humanities to establish itself as the seat of value and moral education.

It is fascinating to read how moral training began to be a nuisance to most people at the institutions even though it remained a central component to institutional mission.  As she concludes, “But universities no longer have a basis from which to judge moral claims.  The Protestant synthesis that provided moral guidance up until the late nineteenth century did not survive the adoption of modern standards of scholarship or increased cultural diversity” (p. 269).  Also of note is the interesting view of the sciences which focused squarely on method to the degree that the method alone was sufficient enough to inculcate moral training.  This proved to be a failure.

What makes this of particular interest is that this is precisely the same argument that the new atheist crowd is making - exactly.  If we can only push out the constraints of religion, then scientific morality can reign supreme.  Dogmatism became the four letter word in the academy of scientific rational discourse.  To be sure it can take this role.  However, the notion that morality can be aught through method did not work then.  Why should we believe in the new atheist argument that the same thing can work now?  They have literally made nothing new of the argument - nothing at all - if we take Reuben’s analysis of the same set of claims made in the birth of the research institution in her time frame of inquiry.  Thus, by association, her argument places the current debates regarding the public intellectualism of new atheism and its penchant for value statements regarding the secular methodology of scientific rationalism as a vehicle for rationally based ethics in proper context.

I recommend reading Marsden’s The Soul of the American University and Ringenberg’s The Christian College in conjunction with this volume.  A logical follow through is Sloan’s book Faith and Knowledge where he continues to plot the trajectory of fact and value in higher education through Christian neo-Orthodox theology.  Finally, a recent musing on the topic of how morality is at the margins of higher education hearkening to the university reform movement in the early 19th century is C. John Sommerville’s short book The Decline of the Secular University.  This is how I would design a graduate seminar in the place of religion and morality in the history of higher education since Darwin’s The Origin of Species.