"Constituting the American Mind is about early efforts to establish a national university and what those efforts say about the nature and logic of American Constitutionalism. This book offers the first in depth study of the efforts to establish a national university from a constitutional perspective. While mostly noted in passing, the national university was put forward by every president from Washington to John Quincy Adams as a necessary supplement to the formal institutions of government; it would help constitute the American mind in a manner that carried forward the ideas the constitution rested on including, for example, the separation of the "civic" from the "theological.""--

A core institution in the human endeavor—the public research university—is in transition. As U.S. public universities adapt to a multi-decadal decline in public funding, they risk losing their essential character as a generator, evaluator, and archivist of ideas and as a wellspring of tomorrow’s intellectual, economic, and political leaders. This book explores the core interdependent and coevolving structures of the research university: its physical domain (buildings, libraries, classrooms), administration (governance and funding), and intellectual structures (curricula and degree programs). It searches the U.S. history of the public research university to identify its essential qualities, and generates recommendations that identify the crucial roles of university administration, state government and federal government.