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.

After 1945, the words “anti-fascist education” appeared much less frequently in the western zones of occupied Germany than in the Soviet zone, but the concerns expressed by the phrase were shared by all occupying powers: How could education help prevent a resurgence of Nazism? For the American and British occupation authorities, and to a lesser extent, the French, the answer was to “reeducate” for democracy. The leaders of German universities in the western zones answered this question differently. Drawing on the traditional German “idea of the university,” German professors stressed the inculcation of morality through Bildung or character formation. In practical terms, this meant very little change in curriculum, course content, or educational structure: Only a rededication to university traditions supposedly uncompromised and unaffected by Nazism could lead German higher education, and by extension Germany, away from fascism.

On January 28,1953, the RIAS-Schulfunkparlament (Berlin Student Parliament) celebrated its fifth anniversary. Despite the distractions of having important West German politicians in their midst as a sign of support, the young parliamentarians handled that day's business with their usual mix of enthusiasm and determination. These elected secondary school students debated five bills that afternoon, agreeing upon four of them. Among those that passed was a commitment to assist in the construction of a new library for pupils living in the Soviet sector of Berlin. Wilhelm-Dietrich von Thadden, a member of the cabinet, reported on his successful work with school authorities to institute the parliament's proposal for changes in school menu offerings. Another representative, Hanna Gätke, informed her colleagues about the Christmas activities of the parliament, which had raised 450 Deutsche Marks for charity and provided over 900 gifts to elderly Berliners. Before adjourning the meeting, the students discussed the activities of student government in each section of the city and continued their debate about the parliament's larger goals.

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.”

Within weeks and months of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, numerous busts and portraits of school namesakes disappeared from the foyers, hallways, and “tradition rooms” (Traditionszimmer) of East Berlin schools and were relegated to trash bins. In 1990 municipal authorities formalized this spontaneous purge of school identities by eliminating the names of all schools in eastern Berlin. Over the course of the 1990s administrators, teachers, and students in the newly restructured schools began to discuss a wide range of new school identities.

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.