For more than fifty years, an enduring criticism of American higher education has been that it offers students a smorgasbord of courses and choices without coherence, interconnection, or relevance to the deeper purposes of life. How this fragmentation came about is the topic of this essay. American higher education went through a major transformation that began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and received new momentum during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In this later period, many of the trends attacked by critics in the first half of the twentieth century greatly accelerated and new, even more destructive developments were added to the educational mix. One result is the incoherent curriculum. This essay, "From Christian Gentleman to Bewildered Seeker" by Russell K. Nieli, tells how it happened.