order to establish their national dignity they often founded universities (see
Brodeur and Chitando in this volume), and when people in these universities
studied religions, they tended to study the religions of their own regions, not
someone else’s. That certainly suggests that their studies were informed by an
underlying nationalistic purpose, or at least a deep-rooted nationalistic interest.
But the degree to which the desire to establish a post-colonial identity motivated
and shaped the study of religion in these regions demands further study.
Thus, political factors would seem to provide a rich account of the
motivation for and direction of the study of religions that emerged almost
globally after World War II, but they are probably not the whole story. None
of the factors mentioned above provides any real justification for the emergence
of religious studies. Just as the political goals of Communists could be met by
a dogmatic attack upon religion, so the political goals of anti-Communists and
emergent nationalists could have been met by simply embracing religion—but
they were not. The popularity of political explanations should not blind us to
other forces that may also have been at work, some of them global in scale.
Nor should we consider the study of religions only in isolation.
In the period following World War II, several factors interacted to produce
a tremendous increase in the number of tertiary educational institutions
worldwide. It is common to mention the desire of new nations to establish
independent universities, a shift from elite to mass education, and a post-war
increase in population (but cf. Schofer and Meyer 2005 on demonstrable causal
factors). As John W. Meyer (2006: x) has observed:[A]lmost 20 percent of a cohort of young people in the world is now found
in an institution of higher education—fifty years ago [in the mid 1950s],
it might have been 2 percent, and fifty years before that it might have been
a fraction of 1 percent.... A country like Kazakhstan, for instance, might
have as many higher education students as the whole world had in 1900.Less impressionistically, Evan Schofer and Meyer (2005: 898) note that in
1900 there were about 500,000 higher education students worldwide; in 2000
there were about 100,000,000—20,000 percent more. The vast majority of
this growth has occurred since 1960. With such a large increase in academic
activity worldwide, a global increase in the number of people studying religions
will have an impact on scholarly production, but it is hardly newsworthy.
Other developments may be newsworthy. In one of the very few careful
studies devoted to the university worldwide, David John Frank and Jay Gabler
(2006) examine the ways in which universities throughout the world changed
during the twentieth century. They acknowledge the role of political and
economic factors, but they see those factors as too variable to account for
global patterns. Adopting a neo-institutional perspective, they explain changes
in university structure in terms of ‘changing assumptions about reality, written306
GREGORY D. ALLES