"Fifty years later, the ideas Veysey developed in two years of white-hot scholarly intensity continue to shape our basic understanding of academe."
— Chronicle of Higher Education
"This magisterial book carved such a wide swath of intellectual real estate when it came out in 1965 that few have dared to follow its path. Veysey wrote this book during the free-spending, post-Sputnik heyday of American higher education, when government investment in students and institutions spurred growth unmatched before or since in academe. Veysey looked closely and skeptically at the conflicting ideas that were muzzled and muffled when universities were founded at the turn of the century, and he showed that those conflicts — between utility and belletrism, between research and teaching — continued to smolder, and sometimes flare, afterward. They still burn today, and that makes this brilliant book as useful as it ever was."
— Leonard Cassuto, Chronicle of Higher Education