“When was it in the middle, where it should be?”
At the time of the Founding, for the first 50 years of the Republic, even after the Civil War for a while. The shift began in the later 1800s with the adopting of the German research university model and the shift to legal positivism out of disillusionment (Oliver Wendell Holmes) and the class warfare of the so-called “Gilded Age” and the countering “Age of Reform”(imported Marxism and anarchism from Europe), gained momemtum around WWI, tipped in the ‘30s. Just because it’s so obvious today doesn’t mean it was always that way.
If one simply dismisses it as “that’s the way it’s always been” one loses one weapon in the struggle against it: an accurate reading of history and the hope of changing the status quo.
You’re right on the money.
The commencement of industrial funding of education, and the simultaneous abandonment of the confessional nature of most colleges seeking industrial funding, was the proximate cause of the embrace of “Progressivism” as an overarching political programme and logical positivism as the default philosophical perspective of the modern university.
It took a century for that shift to work itself fully through the system, and for nearly all the previously regnant philosophies to be expelled, but here we are.
Thanks