In this deeply researched and forcefully argued book, J. David Hoeveler follows the life and career of John Bascom (1827–1911), philosopher, theologian, sociologist, and university president, and traces the intellectual foundations of the Wisconsin Idea—a philosophy that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century that public universities should contribute knowledge for the welfare of the citizenry, help improve the functioning of government, and, though direct outreach, confront the real problems of the state and its people. As we face contemporary privatization trends that undermine higher education as a public good, this book serves as a reminder of the powerful ideas that nurtured the land-grant college promises of democratic service and state engagement. Hoeveler has a magisterial command of intellectual movements that resist generalization and that demand readers wrestle with nuance and complexity. As one follows Bascom's career, the reader does not observe a stagnant academic life in nineteenth-century colleges. Hoeveler presents young minds being shaped through a robust exchange of theological, philosophical, and scientific perspectives. Of course, we encounter rearguard defenders of orthodoxy, but through Bascom we are exposed to progressive voices promoting new ideas in religion, sociology, politics, and economics. Indeed, the theory of evolution led Bascom to understand “all creation” as interconnected and malleable, a formative idea that fueled his commitment to employing the power of the state to ameliorate social, economic, and moral degradation. Bascom's Liberal Protestantism and the theory of evolution united into a Social Gospel theology of political and social justice reform that gave spiritual and intellectual birth to the Wisconsin Idea.

Hoeveler begins with a young Bascom in the 1830s, bright and conscientious, but often bored with the isolation of the family farm in upstate New York. Yet his upbringing exposed him to the religious fervor and reform movements of the Second Great Awakening. After rejecting the human depravity and predestination orthodoxy of his father's Calvinism, Bascom embraced and elaborated a Liberal Protestantism, first as a student at Andover Theological Seminary and then as a professor at Williams College, Massachusetts. In German idealism, with its dual rejection of skeptic, agnostic empiricism and medieval religious orthodoxy, Bascom found the intellectual grounding to both observe the social and natural environment and employ the godly powers of reason to conceptualize an ideal order. In Darwin's theory of evolution, Bascom found a “governing, rational process” that suggested God was more than a prime mover of creation; God was an “active presence” that nurtured progressive development in human and natural history (p. 33). As the aptly dubbed “political professor,” Bascom taught that God occasionally “sent the world new truths” and that human redemption required extinguishing the evils of slavery, alcohol, oppression, and abject poverty (p. 33). He also advocated for women's suffrage and educational opportunities regardless of sex. In discussing Bascom's final years as a Williams professor and advocate for change, the author provides a memorable string of anecdotes (capped with a corrective on US president James Garfield's famous story of sitting on a log with Williams president Mark Hopkins) that tell of Bascom's public critique of President Hopkins's excessive power, the college's resistance to enrollment expansion and curricular reform, and his colleagues’ stalwart opposition to coeducation.

Feeling stifled at Williams, Bascom accepted the presidency of the University of Wisconsin in 1873, and the middle five chapters are devoted to these years. Hoeveler argues that the idea of a state university as a public good was rooted in the “religious, moral, and spiritual content” of Bascom's teachings, sermons, and writings, and the author illustrates how Bascom translated this theology into state activism on economic issues, temperance, and gender equality. Hoeveler explains how the typical scholar of political economy during this period supported laissez-faire economics and praised individual ambition, but to Bascom unbridled individualism could produce “a society marked by a glaring disparity of wealth and poverty” (p. 39). He warned that “personal liberty cannot become so powerful as to conflict with the needs of ‘a healthy state.’ … The general good must override individual good” (p. 39). In viewing society as an interconnected organism, Bascom cautioned his students against such imbalances of wealth and opportunity, and he encouraged an activist state to return the human community to a “healthy equilibrium” (p. 97). Such sentiments led Bascom to promote workers’ rights, unionization, and the strike. Bascom had long viewed alcohol as a cause of poverty, abuse, broken families, and crime, and he developed close ties with the Wisconsin Prohibition Party (of which his daughter would be an important leader) and directly challenged the powerful cabal of Milwaukee brewers. In women's rights, Bascom believed that human evolution had produced an “expansion of Reason, opening up the world to new possibilities and human progress” (p. 144). In his ardent support of suffrage and coeducation, Bascom saw women overcoming their “narrow experience, their social confinement” and achieving a “nobler and better life—the very life that God is leading us” (p. 147). In his political activism, Bascom was without peer: “No other president of any large university had such a record” (p. 4).

The book concludes with the aftermath of Bascom's resignation from the University of Wisconsin in 1887 in the wake of the regents’ growing opposition to his partisan activities. However, the political milieu was shifting, and the former president's ideas “saw a manifest realization” after his departure (p. 174). Hoeveler follows the careers of such Bascom disciples as progressive reformer and Wisconsin governor Robert La Follette. In classes with Bascom, La Follette garnered a “zeal for public service,” which he harnessed in fighting powerful corporations, regulating railways and banks, and securing direct primary nominations in Wisconsin (p. 187). In reflecting upon Bascom's influence, La Follette stated, “No student ever left this university, while [Bascom] was president, whose college education was not thoroughly seasoned with this sense of higher moral obligation to serve the state” (p. 189). Bascom's successors at the university furthered his commitments to the public good by embracing the sentiment that “the boundaries of the University are the boundaries of the State” (p. 4). The University of Wisconsin would engage with agriculture and industry and create the Legislative Reference Library to aid lawmakers in crafting progressive legislation. And undergirding these activities was the intellectual legacy of John Bascom, “who brought this cerebral life into the political and social issues of the day” (p. 4).

There is little to critique in this work. As with many intellectual histories, it is not always easy to connect individual thinkers to social movements. On this, Hoeveler agrees by stating, “Intellectual history is rarely a matter of direct influence, one thinker to another, rarely a straight trajectory” (p. 207). While La Follette and University of Wisconsin president Charles Van Hise expressed indebtedness to Bascom's ideas, there were many other ideas that shaped reformers during the Progressive Era. Because of these cross-intellectual currents, readers will agree with Hoeveler that Bascom provided formative ideas to future political and university reformers but will have greater difficulty judging the magnitude and scope of that influence. In short, Hoeveler has again advanced the intellectual history of American higher education, and readers will applaud the author for shedding light on the richness of ideas in nineteenth-century colleges. As for Bascom, many readers may find a model for the current age, as we in higher education continue to strive for ways to transcend campus borders and rigid disciplinary boundaries to engage the problems in our communities.