John Sommerville, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Florida, begins this book with a paradox. American universities are bigger and more prestigious than ever and increasingly irrelevant to social and political life. The purpose of his book is to articulate this paradox, to explain it and to diagnose the ills that have led to it. Chief among them, he thinks, is their secularisation, the marginalisation of religion within them despite the continuing religiosity of the country in which they operate.

One important aspect of the paradox is this: a very high proportion of American citizens go to college and university and yet there is a kind of emptiness at the heart of higher education. ‘We have lots of programs that tell you how to make money and be useful to the economy. But where would you learn how to spend your money intelligently? That is, where does one learn what is valuable in and of itself? What is the point of money?’ (p. 8; emphasis original). The same point can be made at a social level. Political leaders are happy to oversee a huge amount of financial support for universities from the public purse and private benefactors continue to make major donations, especially to the most famous institutions. Yet, though they may provide technical advice of an expert sort, no one expects the recipients of this largesse to be sources of social vision and political leadership. In this respect modern universities contrast sharply with their forerunners and thus manifestly fail to realise the ambitions with which their century-long climb to wealth and prestige began.

What explains this paradoxical position? Sommerville thinks secularisation has created a vacuum. ‘Universities muddle through with a big mystery at their center: a mystery in the shape of religion’ (p. 29). Without something like religion, universities in general, and the liberal arts college in particular, lack a proper rationale: the humanising and civilising purpose of education. Moreover, because the academy has excluded from the sphere of the intellect the thing which matters most, anti-intellectualism can flourish outside the academy. Until such time as the topics typical of religion are readmitted as respectable and respected items in the curriculum, the paradox of prestigious but socially irrelevant institutions of higher education will remain.

Taking this basic thought as his orientation, Sommerville covers a great deal of ground in a short compass. The fact/value dichotomy, multiculturalism, the science/religion debate, secular ethics and modern technology, the elimination of the literary canon, the loss of an informed historical consciousness, the scope of naturalist explanation, are all identified as facets of secularisation and contributors to educational and cultural impoverishment. When several of these chapters have just a few pages (seven for the fact/value dichotomy; nine for the implications of modern science), the impression grows that Sommerville has too many targets in his sight to make his argument satisfactory. Although almost every chapter has insights worth thinking about, his approach becomes more scattergun than scalpel, a faint aura of hysteria descends and its persuasiveness accordingly dissipates.

This book sets out on an interesting path that others could follow, but pursue more profitably. To my mind, Sommerville overlooks entirely two major forces at work in the world with which he is concerned – materialism and democracy. The triumph of materialism has given professional education its prominence and popularity in higher education and the democratic spirit that has made all thought of moral and political leadership based on learning suspect. In combination their effect has been to privatise religion. This is indeed a misfortune for education (and for religion), but we ought not to mistake effect for cause.