Looking Back at Newman

Abstract

Looking Back at Newman Don J. Briel (bio) I will focus initially on an article by Theodore Hesburgh, “Looking Back at Newman,” which appeared in America magazine on March 3, 1962.1 Hesburgh noted that anyone who attempted to revise Newman’s account of the university risked denunciation. He had, he said, the courage to take this risk, and is confident that in doing so he speaks in the name of what Land O’Lakes later called the university in the full modern sense of the word. He argues that Newman had long been one of his heroes and that he had read and admired his university essays more times than he could recall. But he then notes that Newman “never did create the university he wrote about, nor did he have to administer it.”2 Hesburgh identifies himself, in contrast, as “harried by the many developmental and administrative problems that face a university president today,” and suggests that “it is easier to write about what a Catholic university should be than to create and administer one in reality.”3 Hesburgh’s ignorance of Newman’s history as founder and rector/president of the Catholic University of Ireland is remarkable. But in an attitude of noblesse oblige, Hesburgh concedes, “Let us not chide Cardinal Newman for writing in the middle of the nineteenth century instead of the middle of the twentieth,” and he suggests that [End Page 21] Newman could not have imagined the complex and dangerous developments that later occurred. Among these unimaginable developments Hesburgh mentions, astonishingly, the Industrial Revolution.4 I would like to summarize Hesburgh’s primary claims about the modern Catholic university, for I think that they explain many of the commitments and assumptions found in the Land O’Lakes statement. Let me mention four of them. ________ One, there has been a proliferation of information and a subsequent expansion of university disciplines that requires a shift from Newman’s emphasis on the central role of liberal education to a more specialized and technical focus, one that finds fullest expression in graduate studies. Hesburgh reminds us, somewhat breathlessly, that more than ninety percent of all of the scientists and almost all of the behavioral scientists who ever lived were alive in 1962. Two, Hesburgh argues that Newman’s emphasis on teaching and learning, while still important, must be situated within a new and vital emphasis on applied and specialized research. He speaks with remarkable confidence that for the first time, not merely in thousands of years but some hundreds of thousands of years, it is now possible that man, assisted by the Catholic university, “can liberate himself from those ancient evils of ignorance, disease, grinding poverty, homelessness and hunger” or, alternatively, he will become an accomplice in returning the world to the Stone Age.5 As an inevitable result, he says, the Catholic university is now drawn to the work of planting new breeds of corn in Mexico, studying native languages in New Guinea, and testing the depth of the ice in Antarctica. He does, however, note that the university’s willingness to oversee the transmission of technical competence should not include superficial skills such as hairdressing, fly-casting, and folk dancing. To achieve this new utilitarian and technical power, university presidents could no longer limit themselves “to developing the idyll of knowledge for knowledge’s sake envisioned by Newman.”6 Three, Newman, of course, did not share this confidence in humanity’s [End Page 22] capacity to create a utopian world. In contrast to Hesburgh’s belief in the world-transforming power of the new university, Newman, as early as 1832, criticized the modern temptation to assume that technology and science would be the means of creating a good society without going to the trouble of forming virtuous men and women. Hesburgh, in contrast, insists that the mission of the Catholic university is redemptive, and “that what needs redeeming today is quite a different kind of world from Newman’s.”7 It is here that we see a critical break. It would not have occurred to Newman to think that the Catholic university would be the agent of the redemption of history. We can now...