Anthony Kronman, a law prof at Yale, has some thoughts on how higher education understood as research is no longer able to shape souls, why higher education is spiritually impoverished. It no longer asks the big questions, it no longer addresses the students capacity to wonder at the world and themselves. It no longer seduces them to love thinking about the hardest and the most important things. While the article is imperfect in too many ways to mention (and will be obvious to any reader), yet it is worth reading. Perhaps his book will be too. 
That the article is indeed "imperfect in too many ways to mention" can be taken as a proof of Kronman's hypothesis.
The utility and success of the Scientific Method (aka research) in the sciences has perhaps led to its misapplication in other realms, e.g. the "social sciences". And the hard sciences will perhaps eventually hit the same wall as the humanities and the social sciences, that there is nothing more for research to accomplish. We can research sub-sub-quark physics (and do) but we are, and always will be, left with puzzle of the Big Bang.