American university authority: sub specie scientiae/academiae

"...As many professions as feasible would locate the center of their authority within university schools. By defining its functions comprehensively and constantly expanding its clientele, the American university would serve to enhance the public's image of a professional authority in the society.
"The weight of that authority could not be minimized in a nation that not only lacked respect for historical tradition but which, for the most part, lacked a common past.
...
"Americans lacked tradition as a source of authority, but did not lack 'science'. It was the primary function of American universities to render universal scientific standards credible to the public. Indeed, by means of science cultivated within the university, Americans even discovered the origins of a usable history in the German forest and on the American frontier -- a scientific history now pioneered by professional scholars. To the middle-class American in the later nineteenth century, science implied more than method and procedure."

-- The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, Burton J. Bledstein, 1976, p. 325-326.