Crystallization of Organization and Purpose.

During the final three decades of the nineteenth century, educational leaders in the United States had engaged in acrimonious debate about the fundamental nature and purpose of American higher education; by the early years of the new century, however, these debates had largely ended, and by 1910 a new consensus had been reached on the goals and the structure of the modern American university. The institution that emerged from this long philosophical ferment was uniquely American and differed from its predecessors in three key ways. First, conceding the criticism that the traditional university curriculum had been excessively arcane or simply irrelevant to the changing conditions of American society, schools now exhibited great concern that their curricula reflect practical, "real-world" subjects, such as engineering and accounting. The second difference between the university of...