Rueben, Julie. Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Summary
Julie Reuben examines the interaction between institutional and intellectual change and argues that the rejection of the “broad conception” (encompassing knowledge and morality) was tied to the changes in educational and scholarly practices at the turn of the 20th century. She converts the “triumph” of scientific research into a problematic by showing how ‘unbiased’ scientific research led to a loss in the universities’ ethical and moral purposes. By the 1930s, ‘value-free’ science had pushed the moral and ethical purposes of the university to the marginalized humanities and, even more consistently, to the extra-curriculum and administration of ‘student life’. The term “truth” thus no longer “encompassed factual knowledge and moral values.” (2) This book examines the intellectual transformation and marginalization of morality in higher education, “from the nineteenth century broad conception of truth to the twentieth-century division between facts and values.” (p. 2) The new conception of knowledge, which emphasized empirically verifiable knowledge, drew on a sharp distinction between “facts” and “values.” Moral and spiritual values could not be objectively verified. The university, from the 1880s to the 1930s, experienced three overlapping stages of reform to reconcile the loss of its moral and ethical purposes. Religious reform (1880-1910) attempted to make the study of religion scientific and objective, but in the end, it affirmed religion’s intellectual marginality. Scientific reform (1910-1920) attempted to encourage good personal habits just as much as liberal Christianity, better knowledge would produce better people. This approach, however, failed by the twentieth century as biological and social scientists argued that the information yielded was practical knowledge, not of moral value. The last reform efforts, Humanistic and Extracurricular (1915-1930) based their claims “to service on their direct moral influence on students” (verse practical knowledge of the sciences) (p. 7). The result of this intellectual transformation, Reuben argues, was similar to religion. “Just as religion had been dissociated from ‘cognitive’ truth, morality became divorced from ‘factual’ knowledge and aligned instead with ‘fictive’ and ‘aesthetic’ truth. The good, then, became associated with the beautiful, not the true” (p. 7) This form of “knowledge” affected how institutions operated and how faculty “pursued” knowledge. Reuben writes, these new conceptions of knowledge “associated agreement with intellectual progress” and “discouraged professors from engaging in controversial moral issues” (p. 3-4) It also led to over-specialization, rather than intellectual synthesis.