UW-Stevens Point’s Roberts co-authors book on the secularization of America’s universities

For more than a century academicians have witnessed a dramatic reversal as American higher education, once predominantly religious in nature, has become more and more secular.

"The Sacred and the Secular University," a 184-page book published by Princeton University Press, seeks to explain and identify the forces and events that transformed religion, taking it out of the schools and many other aspects of public life. The authors are Jon Roberts, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and James Turner, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and director of the Erasmus Institute.

"Our findings confirm a growing dominance of science in American universities and colleges beginning well before 1900," said Roberts. "Prior to the 1870s, religion dominated the sciences in academia. By World War I, science fully detached from theology in most universities and colleges and that trend continues today. In essence, both the natural and social sciences, by adopting a view of their disciplines that did not invoke God as an explanatory principle, separated those disciplines from religious influence."

According to Roberts and Turner, the pursuit of the "scientific truth" led many scholars and researchers away from the larger "truths." This revolution of thought first occurred in the humanities in the mid-19th century, when the humanities consisted largely of the study of Latin and Greek. The authors’ research clearly showed that by 1900 the humanities had expanded to include history, philosophy, literature and art history.

Much of Roberts’ research for the book was supported through a $21,200 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Roberts, who received his master’s plus a doctorate in American intellectual and cultural history from Harvard University, came to UWSP in the fall of 1985. That year he was awarded the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History. The award was for his work, "Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and Organic Evolution, 1859-1900," published by the University of Wisconsin Press. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Missouri.

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