Chapter 4: The Idea of a University

Abstract

Having explored the arguments that focused, both directly and indirectly, on the role of the humanities in the face of cries for “useful knowledge,” whether these advocates responded by simply inverting the hierarchical relation between imaginative and instrumentalist forms of knowledge or by trying to reimagine the relations between them in ways that emphasized their deeper mutuality, I want to finish by turning to what remains an iconic text in these debates: John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University. Whatever one thinks of the positions Newman was advocating, the most extraordinary thing may be just how strongly they resemble many of our own debates. However proudly and self-consciously antiquated Newman’s style may have been, his ideas have never been more current. In a time when the pressures confronting the humanities have unleashed an extraordinary number of books, essays, op-eds, talks, and other responses to fundamental questions about the kinds of work that we do within universities and why it matters, it is worth remembering that there are few more direct and engaged examples of work that wrestled directly with these issues: an attempt “to ascertain the function and the action of a University”.