George M. Marsden

Recently the California State University System and several other schools have denied campus privileges to student groups such as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship on the grounds that their requirement that their leaders affirm a faith statement is discriminatory. Most schools still recognize that . . . . Continue Reading »

College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be by Andrew Delbanco Princeton, 240 pages, $24.95 Books warning of the imminent demise of college education are becoming almost as common as those predicting the demise of the printed book. In College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Andrew Delbanco adds his . . . . Continue Reading »

It is often said that every book is autobiographical. That certainly is true of mine. About a decade ago I began working on a book that I eventually called The Soul of the American University (Oxford University Press). My interest in the role of religion in American higher education was sparked by . . . . Continue Reading »

On May 27, 1880, Yale’s aging president, Noah Porter, spoke at Wellesley College on “The Christian College,” a subject then being much debated. The setting tells us much about the era and the topic. Wellesley, a women’s college, had been recently founded by Henry and Pauline . . . . Continue Reading »

Our subject is one of those peculiar phenomena taken for granted in the contemporary world but which from an historical perspective seem anomalous. The phenomenon is that the huge numbers of Protestants in the United States support almost no distinctively Christian program in higher education other . . . . Continue Reading »