What is the role of a university in society? In this innovative book, Chris Brink offers the timely reminder that it should have social purpose, as well as achieve academic excellence. The current obsession with rankings and league tables has perpetuated inequality and is preventing social mobility. This book shows how universities can – and should - respond to societal challenges and promote positive social change.

Explores the decline in religious influence in American universities, discussing why this transformation has occurred.

The professor and historian delivers a major critique of how political and financial attacks on the academy are undermining our system of higher education. Making a provocative foray into the public debates over higher education, acclaimed historian Ellen Schrecker argues that the American university is under attack from two fronts. On the one hand, outside pressure groups have staged massive challenges to academic freedom, beginning in the 1960s with attacks on faculty who opposed the Vietnam War, and resurfacing more recently with well-funded campaigns against Middle Eastern Studies scholars. Connecting these dots, Schrecker reveals a distinct pattern of efforts to undermine the legitimacy of any scholarly study that threatens the status quo. At the same time, Schrecker deftly chronicles the erosion of university budgets and the encroachment of private-sector influence into academic life. From the dwindling numbers of full-time faculty to the collapse of library budgets, The Lost Soul of Higher Education depicts a system increasingly beholden to corporate America and starved of the resources it needs to educate the new generation of citizens. A sharp riposte to the conservative critics of the academy by the leading historian of the McCarthy-era witch hunts, The Lost Soul of Higher Education, reveals a system in peril—and defends the vital role of higher education in our democracy.

"This volume ... is a revision and updating of The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (1994)"--Acknowledgments

Leading scholars explore the role of faith in the university setting

This is a story of religious and democratic covenants and controversies in the foundations of America and in the soul of its colleges and universities. Coinciding entangled democratic beliefs and convictions distinctly define the American body politic and are in the foundation of the nation and its colleges and universities.