Most of the claims about the purposes and achievements of higher education are irreducibly individualistic: it will change your life, through conversion or confirmation of faith, by improving your character, by giving you marketable "abilities," by making you a better member of the community, or by being simply "capable" of operating more effectively in the contemporary world. All of these qualities scale up, of course, but in differing ways.

David Watson explores the question of what higher education sets out to do for students through a number of lenses, including the "evolutionary" stages of modern university history, the sense participants and observers try to make of them, and a collection of "purposes," or intended personal transformations. The resulting combinations are clustered around major questions about the role of universities for their students, and in society at large. He concludes by testing claims about the role of higher education in developing varieties of personal responsibility. The Question of Conscience identifies and explores how varied these claims have been over the long history of the higher enterprise, but also how strong and determined they invariably are.