More Religion, Politics and the University

By Eboo Patel. This week for our course Religion, Politics and the University, my colleague John Inazu and I taught parts of George Marsden’s classic text, The Soul of the American University. Marsden claims that American universities were largely built by “men who came of age during the earthshaking national conflict (the civil war) and who inherited a sense of calling to serve God and nation in a cultural mission who founded and defined American universities.” This was the case both for private colleges that took as a principal purpose Christian formation and also public universities. More...