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foundations and served, among other things, to reproduce specific social
and cultural governing groups. The sources making for internal structural
change were multiple in their originating impetus. Prominent among
them was the intractably growing importance, in almost every conceivable
sense, of natural science.
It
was literally modif)ring the shape of the world
intellectually and materially. And spiritually as well, with a proviso which
was at the same time a kind of hitch. It was at best morally neutral, at worst
morally subversive, and for the most part morally indifferent. There were
also the increasingly secular character of American institutional, civic, and
cultural life and the pragmatic demands made by a boisterous national
economy and a clamorous society. In addition, as a substantial corollary to
such alterations in practical existence, there was undeniable general decline
in the intellectual authority of religion. There existed, therefore, a widely
felt need for some secular substitute for the religion-based moral education
that had heretofore been a central ideological charge and responsibility of
institutions. First, the classics requirement as part of the qualification for
entrance into the more established undergraduate colleges began to erode.
Second, required courses at the lower collegiate level in Greek and Latin
began to be weakened and to fall away. Third, there was a similar decline
in the teaching of what was called "moral philosophy." Traditionally, this
course had been a capstone requirement for graduating seniors, and usual–
ly was taught by the president of the college, who in the past, frequently
been a clergyman. And third, as a consequence in the last quarter of the
century of a new undergraduate curriculum, the course of study was based
more on the idea of free electives than on a prescribed sequence of cours–
es or even of a distribution among a group of stipulated fields.
What we think of today as the humanities-the formal, organized study
of language and literature, philosophy and history, art and music-then
were not a coherent grouping. They were regarded at the time as separate
and independent domains of the classics, modern languages, rhetoric, histo–
ry, philosophy, etc., changing themselves, within an accelerating division of
intellectual labor within the university along with augmented specializa–
tions of knowledge. When the humanities were specifically referred to, as
they occasionally were, what was originally meant was the organized study
of the classics of Latin and Greek.........-once the focus of university study, now
a minority. These reconfigurations were due to the phenomenal growth
throughout the 1890s of new scientific professional organizations, with new
journals for newly organized studies (with hitherto unheard-of nomencla–
tures), and the expansion of the newer social sciences-for example, the first
department of anthropology in America was founded at Columbia in 1896.
Moreover, there had begun a series of internal structural changes in the
character of the academic culture and of scholarly ideals. Under the influence
