In this article, the author first read "The Emergence of the American University" by Lawrence R. Veysey, nearly twenty years ago as a graduate student. She has consulted it innumerable times since, and remains impressed by its ambitious scope, careful research and elegant prose. She has always wondered if Veysey's interest in the history of the university stemmed from the changes that occured on campuses in the years after World War II. She states that Veysey knew about such postwar developments as the creation of semiautonomous research institutes; although he did not mention it, he surely was aware that the federal government had become a significant new patron of the postwar university. According to Veysey, the structure of the American university, its relations of power and the ideas that animated it had been set by 1910 and did not vary significantly after that. She added that by that time, leading universities embodied elements from each of the four intellectual strands that Veysey had argued that vied for institutional dominance at the turn of the twentieth century: utilitarianism, "pure" research, liberal culture, and mental discipline. (Contains 18 notes.)