The Emergence of the American University

After 15 years it is possible to regard one's own writing with some degree of detachment. Yet I find myself standing behind the central point I tried to make in Emergence of the American University, which I am glad to have the opportunity to reassert. It is stated on the very first page of the preface. variety of the conflicting aims for the university, the importance of the division of American academics into several rival camps-which I labeled those of utility, research, and culture-as opposed to lumping them all together or dividing them more conventionally by local campus or individual discipline, is what I sought to emphasize. Since I wrote, it has become increasingly popular to view the coming into being of the university at the end of the nineteenth century as an instance of the larger phenomenon of professionalization. one more recently published book which in effect attempts to cover much the same ground as mine, Burton L. Bledstein, Culture of Professionalism (1976), embraces this concept, as do a host of more specialized recent studies, such as Thomas L. Haskell, Emergence of Professional Social Science (1977). I have pointed out the difficulties of applying this concept to a great many academics in The Humanities, 1860-1920 (Veysey 1979, pp. 47-103). Some concept akin to professionalization no doubt has its uses, although I think I would prefer a term like the academicization of learning to refer to the new structuring of knowledge inside the specialized academic disciplines. Clearly I was too cavalier in my treatment of the theme of professionalism in the book. Yet I was correct in seeing that the term professional was seized upon as an ideal at that time only by the promoters of a utilitarian style of higher education, not by humanists nor by many pure scientists, for whom the word connoted a routinization of work and life that seemed insufficiently idealistic (see my pp. 149-50, 197-203 for the evidence of this). I believe it was the virtue of my book that it comprehended all sectors of the academic population at the end of the nineteenth century. I was especially concerned not to equate the utilitarian impulse with the entire university movement, for this mistake had frequently