In 1998, James Axtell surveyed the state of American higher education and found it not well. It had come under fire from different quarters. State legislatures were cutting the budgets of public universities. Many in the public resented the political leanings of academics and the privileged freedoms they claimed. We heard calls for “fiscal responsibility” and “accountability.” Amid the atmosphere of skepticism and hostility, Axtell offered his inspiring testimonial The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education. The book argued forcefully for the uses of scholarship and the hard work that goes into producing it. It took an expansive look at the collegiate scene, from the college town to the athletic fields, and all the other ingredients that make for the enjoyable and purposeful life of the academic.

Nearly two decades later, most of us in this trade would have to concede that matters are now even worse. So Axtell, after an interval that includes his writing of an excellent history of modern Princeton University, prepared to make another plea. Wisdom's Workshop, a handsome volume from Princeton University Press, properly footnoted, starts with a fact that many people know and that all should know: the United States has, and has had for some time, the finest universities in the world. Through a long trajectory, Axtell explains how we got there. He focuses on the elite universities of America, those renowned everywhere as the leading research institutions.

He takes on a daunting task, as any would allow. Understandably, certain emphases, modes of study, and analysis do prevail over others. Axtell's study gives large place to sociology and structural change. And he states at the outset that we must consider American universities not as “unique, sui generis, creations, but as variable, contingent products of specific times, places, and conditions” (p. xiv).

So focused, Axtell provides rich contexts of the academic history as he takes the reader through its successive stages. So we see the early medieval universities within an organic social environment of interrelated parts. Thus, in 1323, the University of Paris stood amid some twenty-eight booksellers in the Latin Quarter and the open-air bookstalls that one finds yet today along the banks of the Seine. Book culture receives much attention here. Libraries grew in the colleges and universities, their contents often the subject of spirited controversy. Colleges were born of private benefaction and royal bequest. The universities, Axtell explains, existed essentially to prepare professionals for a social role that would maintain the social order. They found it no easy task to shape raw youth for these purposes and authorities believed they had to impose regulations aplenty. Students were not to attend brothels, shoot dice, or blaspheme. Nor were they to exhibit a haughty superiority. At thirteenth-century Heidelberg, students faced a fine if they wore fancy dress, with silk sleeves and pointed shoes cited as among the sins of attire! But a different attitude prevailed later at the English universities. Authorities at Oxford frowned on the indistinctive dress of the students; they should instead exemplify the high-class ways of a social order properly denoted by social distinctions. “For the companions of your recreation,” Henry Peachem told Oxbridge students, “consort yourself with gentlemen of your own rank and quality” (p. 74n71).

That admonition came from Peachem's The Complete Gentleman (1622) and exemplifies Axtell's very resourceful use of the wide array of interesting sources he located for the narrative in this history. They make his chapter on the “German Impress” especially memorable. Here we have firsthand accounts of many American students who attended German universities in the nineteenth century to pursue advanced studies and experience the life of scholarship. We have personal testimonies from James Morgan Hart, Bliss Perry, Richard T. Ely, James Mark Baldwin, William Berryman Scott, G. Stanley Hall, and Basil Gildersleeve. And there was woe among the weal. These reports modify the usual glossy-eyed accounts of the American discovery of Germany. But Charles William Eliot, a young chemist visiting Germany and later Harvard's commanding president, had his doubts. He warned that the German model would not work well in the American setting. Axtell describes the significant adaptations of the German system made by the American academic leadership.

One can also appreciate in this study the author's peripheral vision; throughout, his account brings the American colleges and universities into interconnections with other organizations. Thus, the American colonial colleges all had close ties to their colonial governments and they essentially constituted a “public-private coalition” (p. 125). The chapter titled “A Land of Colleges” shows the important associations the colleges had with evangelical organizations like the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education in the West and from the American Education Society. Later attention focuses on wealthy foundations like the Rockefeller General Education Board and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of [College] Teaching. Regional accrediting groups emerged. Axtell observes also the emergence of specific academic departments, national professional organizations along the same lines, the changing composition of boards of trustees, and alumni associations. And a new structural network contributed much to the boom years of American higher education, the eras of World War II, and the Cold War. Thus we had the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Strategic Research and Development (OSRD). The OSRD later signed about five hundred contracts with nine American universities in a successful effort to defeat Germany and Japan. And these collaborative projects were only beginning.

So this study makes important interconnections in its account of the American university and its rise to world preeminence. But something is missing. If we want to know how higher education interacts with the world, we should certainly include the intellectual and cultural elements that also define that milieu. How does the college absorb or process new movements in ideas—philosophy, religion, politics, science? And, more appropriately for the later years of this study, how does the university discover and advance new knowledge? The author's counsel to consider our institutions of learning in terms of their particular times and places applies here also. And to borrow from the book's subtitle, what makes a college or university “modern”? This history might say more about how the colonial colleges appropriated the Enlightenment or how they fit into the complexities of the Great Awakening and the American Revolution. But these formative movements receive scant attention here. Also, in the nineteenth century, how did American universities react to the challenges of science, especially Darwinism? These institutions remained throughout this era bastions of laissez-faire economics and free-trade ideology. But a new generation of social thinkers arose to challenge this orthodoxy and prepare the way for progressivism in the next century. Thus, for example, the American Economic Association, with its founding in 1885, represents not only a new academic structure but an ideological shift. Other opportunities abound. So I would like to have seen more of intellectual history, more of the life of the mind, in this important book that nonetheless recommends itself for its engaging interest and impressive scholarship.