The problem of liberal education in the modern university is confronted in this book directed to academics in all fields. The history of the evolution of American higher education is examined and a philosophical consideration of how liberal education can be achieved today is addressed. The role of the development of libraries, research, and laboratories--along with an emerging democratic spirit that encouraged universities by about 1900 to serve the needs of the communities that supported them--is described. Democracy and research, it is noted, combined to launch the modern "university idea"-- an institution devoted to research with the expectation that it would enrich society. Liberal education's place in this modern academic context is established by a reformulation of the problem: to organize scholarship so that it will create and nurture individuals as freely functioning participants in the community. It is argued that there is no simple link between acquisition of knowledge and the growth of a mind, but that the process of growth is mediated by habitual reflection on relationships among various activities. Liberal education, with its emphasis on diversity, technique, and procedure, rather than on subject matter, is concluded to be the working structure of an autonomous intelligence. (LBH)