American higher education has slowly been refined to the present model, rich with choice and loosely held together by a common moral standard. The purpose of education has been changed since the establishment of the colonial colleges; likewise, the collegiate experience and curriculum also transformed to meet the demands of society over the past few centuries. Author Julie A. Reuben addresses these changes in The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality, published in 1996 through Chicago University Press. This book combines her doctoral dissertation with additional research to tell a story about how the colonial colleges from the seventeenth century slowly developed into modern American universities. Reuben combines general analyses of cultural and intellectual shifts with case studies from eight specific universities: California at Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Stanford, and Yale (9).