At a seminar held in his honor at Brown University in 1973, Talcott Parsons was asked by a colleague, “Why don't you study what's right under your nose, your own profession, the university as a social organization?” Parsons went on to announce that a “fat volume” on just this topic was being prepared for publication. The book was The American University, published in 1973 with coauthor Gerald M. Platt.

Although he had published on academic issues off and on since the late 1950s—see, for example, his paper on “The School Class as a Social System: Some of Its Functions in American Society”—it was not until the late 1960s that Parsons engaged in a vigorous and sustained study of higher education. He believed that within the educational revolution itself, with its emphasis on cognitive rationality, there was a tension that championed expressive and affective components. These affective components were first identified by Parsons as the expressive revolution of religion and religious assertion, but later he interpreted elements of this expressive revolution as manifested within the university system itself, epitomized in student unrest culminating in high-profile disturbances in American universities and elsewhere beginning in the 1960s. Embedded within this demonstrative project is a Kantian universalism that sees civil society as developing toward the inclusion of an increasing percentage of its members, which is, in essence, the hallmark of modernity. As Parsons argued,

Parsons partially explained this tension cybernetically, namely, with the explosion in higher education concomitant to the educational revolution; there was an inflation of its key circulating medium—intelligence—and that on some important levels student radicals of the 1960s marshaled affective and emotional responses to this inflation in the form of protests and other campus disturbances.