Abstract

Delivered as the 55th Annual John Dewey Lecture, sponsored by the John Dewey Society, at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco, April 27, 2013. I want to say up front that I’m here under false pretenses. I’m not a Dewey scholar or a philosopher; I’m a sociologist doing history in the field of education. And the title of my lecture is a bit deceptive. I’m not really going to talk about what college is good for. Instead, I’m going to talk about how the institution we know as the modern American university came into being. As a sociologist, I’m more interested in the structure of the institution than in its philosophical aims. It’s not that I’m opposed to these aims. ..