The American college and university have never been more essential to the health of the nation and at the same time, more under threat. In a series of interlocking essays exploiting the insights of wise elders, Nelson depicts a varied, ever-evolving academic “marketplace” serving disparate needs and interests. His defense of the university’s fundamental imperatives—open inquiry and service—is more pertinent today than ever.

Michael Birkner, Gettysburg College

This is a book for our times. With the corporatization of the modern university, the ideological divides, the controversies over free speech, and the reduction of the humanities, more than ever before we need to be reminded of the long-standing and historic vision of the role of higher education in America. Drawing on a wide expanse of American history, Nelson offers a narration of the roles universities have played over time and a call to keep the university as a place devoted to the common good: where knowledge is passed on to the next generation, ideas can be debated, society and the state can be critiqued and challenged, and students are instilled with a sense of responsibility for giving back to society.

Linford Fisher, Brown University

In this collection of essays, Stephen J. Nelson examines the many challenges facing American higher education today through a bracing dialogue with its past. Placing urgent contemporary issues like institutional self-definition, curricular design, ideological conflict, and academic freedom in their deep historical perspective over nearly four centuries, he argues passionately that the essential task for the university is to preserve its fundamental values of open inquiry, free speech, and communal discourse as a model for and expression of American democratic values. Nelson's vision of America's colleges and universities as unique custodians and interpreters of our core values of individualism, equality, and the common good—our creed of "e pluribus unum"—sounds a clarion call for faculty, administrators, and trustees alike to embrace the moral dimensions of their vocations and to call their institutions to accountability in these times of distraction and drift.

Stephen A. Marini, Wellesley College