An Academic Counter-Revolution: Newman and Tractarian Oxford’s Idea of a University

Abstract

Abstract University reform in the age of liberal revolution took a variety of forms. Historians have tended to focus on only one model of university reform in Britain, that propagated by liberal and radical reformers. However this model, which in the context of the undisputed Anglican hegemony of the two English universities in the early nineteenth century had distinctly secularizing, if not anticlerical overtones, was by no means the only one. This paper concentrates upon a very different, counter-revolutionary scheme put forward by a party in the Church of England no less dissatisfied with the status quo in the University of Oxford than their liberal counterparts. The leaders of this active party expounded, in a rich vein of pamphlet and periodical literature, an alternative educational ideal to that put forward by liberals. It was an ideal shaped by and related to the Oxford context in which it was born, but which at the same time was to provide the ultimate inspiration for one of the classic treatises on the purposes of universities in the English-speaking world, John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University