Is John Henry Newman's Nineteenth-Century The Idea of a University Relevant in the Twenty-First Century?

Abstract

Is John Henry Newman's Nineteenth-Century The Idea of a University Relevant in the Twenty-First Century? Allan Patience (bio) First published in 1852, John Henry Newman's work, The Idea of a University (henceforth The Idea), has been lauded down the years as a signal defense of what constitutes (or should constitute) a modern liberal university education. It remains in print today.1 In recent years the book has come under critical scrutiny. Newman is admonished for his English provincialism and his commitment to his Catholic faith. His views about the necessity to include theology in university curricula are written off as outdated and anti-liberal. His high Victorian prose style and misogynist defense of universities as bastions of male entitlement are easy targets for parody. His critics argue that his "idea" is principally an outdated defense of a privileged patriarchal ivory tower, aloofly distanced from the harsh realities confronting universities in the twenty-first century. His indifference to research in universities is seen as especially problematic. These criticisms, however, underestimate the nineteenth-century cultural and academic constraints within which Newman was defending what, in his time, was a radical view of a university. It was (and remains) a view that laid the foundations for future reforms. Moreover, his Catholicism is far more subtle than many of his critics appear to understand. This article aims to show that the essentials of his nineteenth-century defense of a liberal university are still relevant to the challenges facing the public university in the twenty-first century. [End Page 70] This article is divided into six sections. Section one provides a brief account of recent critiques on The Idea. Section two surveys some signal calls for university reforms advanced in the eighteenth century by scholars as diverse as Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, and Edmund Burke, paving the way for The Idea. Section three focuses on The Idea and its arguments against Utilitarianism and a purely defensive clericalism. Given their critical force, section four addresses Professor Stefan Collini's reservations about The Idea.2 Section five briefly surveys Newman's liberal legacy extending from the nineteenth century to the present. Section six draws the article to its conclusion—viz., that The Idea still has much to offer in defense of the idea of the university today. CONTRA NEWMAN Alasdair MacIntyre has wittily summarized the growing contemporary discontent with The Idea: "To criticise contemporary universities from Newman's standpoint would be, on [his critics'] view, like blaming a jet engine for not having the excellences of a windmill."3 However, windmills are not to be sniffed at. Their "excellences" as the precursors of the wind turbines that are generating significant amounts of today's clean energy should not be forgotten. Moreover, as the discipline of the history of ideas teaches us, old ideas, like old technologies, are often the necessary precursors of new ones. Nonetheless, calls for dispensing with The Idea have been steadily increasing. In 1990, for example, J. M. Roberts stated: "As I reread the Idea it seemed to me that its doctrines were narrow, exaggerated, and likely to be sterile as sources of institutional reform."4 In 1996 Bill Readings complained that, "for Newman the teaching of secular culture is a palliative preparation for a sinful world, a world whose redemption is a matter of religious faith rather than scientific knowledge."5 Sheldon Rothblatt has even warned of Newman's "dark and dangerous side."6 In 2012, the former president of the University of Chicago declared: It is quite surprising to find how often Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University is still invoked in writing about higher education. The belief that [End Page 71] such an idea should guide the forms and reforms of universities remains seductive even as it would appear challenged by the reality of today's intensely multitasking university.7 Meanwhile, given the contemporary context and pressures of higher education, Stefan Collini wrote: "Those who wish, nostalgically or defiantly, to cling to what they believe to be the values of the good old days tend to turn to their Newman for support and comfort. . . . I do not intend to encourage or endorse that reaction...