The Promise of Newman’s Collegiate Ideal

Abstract

Many changes has my mind gone through: here it has known no variation or vacillation of opinion. idea of a university, discourse I (1) The only advocacy that should go on in classroom, according to Stanley Fish, is that of virtues. (2) This prescription is, in first place, an antiseptic meant to discourage college and university professors from engaging in political advocacy, but it also provides basis of Fish's positive defense of enterprise of liberal education. One need not agree with his overall conception of academic life in order to join him in affirming that best defense a school could mount of its existence and activities would be framed in terms of practices and persons at its heart, practices of teaching and person of teacher. It is, then, a welcome development that intellectual virtues--the virtues that characterize good teacher--are now being discussed in several academic disciplines. Joining Fish, a literary critic, are historians of early-modern Republic of Letters and philosophers in emerging field of virtue epistemology; they all seek an account of intellectual virtue arguments and examples with which to defend liberal education. Yet compared with educational vision of Blessed John Henry Newman, these contemporary voices sound flat. Lacking a convincing account of end and ordering principle of their educational endeavors, these attempts to defend modern university by an appeal to intellectual virtue all take form of a self-referential argument from authority of contemporary academic life as we happen to find it. In marked contrast, Newman's ideal of almost perfect that would be a Catholic university seated and living in colleges, provides at once a more capacious and a more realistic account of kind of human flourishing that schools are meant to foster. (3) Newman's collegiate ideal offers an institutional model and set of academic practices that promise to form students and teachers who display in their work and their lives that joy in truth (gaudium de veritate) that is best justification for an institution of higher learning because it is sign of fruitfulness that authentic liberal education offers to world. (4) IntellectualVirtues or theVirtues of Intellectuals? Now that we have lived through dot-com and real estate bubbles, it is the education bubble that we face, if Columbia's Mark C. Taylor's prediction comes true. With steady disappearance of small classes taught by seasoned professors, rise to statistical predominance of adjunct faculty and graduate assistants made melancholy by their bleak career prospects, astounding increase in cost of higher education, dilution of quality of undergraduate students, and travails of indebtedness suffered by many institutions, it is hardly surprising that someone should write a book such as Taylor's Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming our Colleges and Universities. Although many of his suggestions have real merit and are undergirded by an acute awareness of shortcomings of contemporary academy, Taylor is not likely to find his fellow teachers ready to embrace his plan as a whole. To learn from example of for-profit universities, to abolish tenure, to restore mandatory retirement age, to encourage partnerships with corporations, to spur innovative interdisciplinary and multimedia teaching, and to abandon academic monograph: this is a program that some may regard as nothing less than abdication of an intellectual ideal in favor of sheer economic opportunism. (5) Such would seem to be likely reaction of Stanley Fish, whose Save World on Your Own Time anticipates Taylor's perspective, if not all of his arguments. Fish's essay, peppered with anecdotes from his years of service as Dean of College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at University of Illinois, Chicago, argues that universities should aggressively defend their central practices and should never apologize for their proper tasks, provided they stick to them. …