The Idea of a University

Hayden W. Ausland
Foreign Languages (Classics)
University of Montana-Missoula

John Henry Cardinal Newman is known principally as the writer mainly responsible for a largely still compelling view of the university as "a place of teaching universal knowledge" (3 [emphasis Newman's]). By "universal" knowledge Newman means the knowledge flowing from liberal, versus practical, learning. This aspect of his view still has resonance, but his larger thesis that the theoretical purpose of teaching such knowledge can be realized in practice only with the help of the Universal or Catholic Church has caused many discomfort since his own time. In our day there remains a real question how to pursue or promote an open-ended liberal education without relying upon a greater authoritative framework for guidance. At a time when nominally academic honors curricula can assimilate themselves to the standard of vocational training, or aim at a therapeutic self-realization characteristic of low Episcopalian forms such as the twelve-step program, recalling Newman's paradigmatic description of a liberating education--precisely because Catholic can be of inestimable service to the Academy.

By presenting a new edition of Newman's work as a part of its "Rethinking the Western Tradition" series, Yale University Press will doubtless prompt a thoughtful discussion of the above question against the background of Newman's classic statement. The volume's preface invites its readers to "think and rethink" Newman's arguments, while the introduction comprises a summary of these followed by an outline of questions the student is directed to entertain. As an aid to the thinking process, some interpretative essays are appended to the work proper. The Idea of a University began as a series of lectures in 1852. These were supplemented by further lectures and essays of 1854 and 1858, with the whole of two parts being issued in its present form first in 1873. The text itself includes the first part on "University Teaching" in its entirety. In order to accommodate the new interpretative essays within the compass of a handy volume, however, Yale has abridged the second part on "University Subjects". Four of the originally ten sections have been kept [(i) Christianity and Letters, (iii) Catholic Literature in the English Tongue, (vii) Christianity and Physical Science, and (viii) Christianity and Scientific Investigation]; six are omitted [(ii) Literature, (iv) Elementary Studies, (v) A Form of Infidelity of the Day, (vi) University Preaching, (ix) Discipline of Mind, and (x) Christianity and Medical Science]. In what has been selected one may trace an interest in the problem of traditional authority as it impinges on key individual disciplines. One might have preferred, however, for the fifth essay ("A Form of Infidelity of the Day") also to have been included, for in it Newman opens by marking a general difference between critics in times of toleration who confront one "in a broad light and with a direct assault", and critics of less open times when "unbelief necessarily made its advances under the language and guise of faith":

...I have no hesitation in saying (apart of course from moral and ecclesiastical considerations, and under correction of the command and policy of the Church), that I prefer to live in an age when the fight is in the day, not in the twilight; and think it a gain to be speared by a foe, rather than to be stabbed by a friend. (John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated, London etc.: Longmans, Green & Co. 1923, 38If.)

In an introduction to the five new essays displacing the six originals suppressed , the editor, Frank M. Turner, explains more fully the governing idea of inducing a "critical" reading of Newman's work. The goal is a kind of self-clarification:

Coming to grips with Newman's ideas and arguments demands that we make clear to ourselves our own stated and unstated presuppositions about the life of universities.... Newman demands that we defend our own thinking when it contrasts with or goes beyond his. (257)

In her opening essay ("Newman in His Own Day"), Martha McMackin Garland (History, Ohio State) loses no time in contracting the horizon to Newman's immediate historical background. This is the world of the universities of early nineteenth-century England, where the relative merits of liberal and practical education were a matter of no little controversy. This debate is of course a permanent thing itself, dating at least from the time of Plato. Newman successfully set the terms of this question in a form assimilable even for others who wish to affirm universal aims of the university that are independent of the teachings of a universal church.

Turner himself (History, Yale) attempts a direct comparison of Newman's university with his own, which he understands to be a mainly post-WWII development ("Newman's University and Ours"). He sees so many crucial changes as having intervened--rampant faculty professionalism, financial over extension, etc.--that he regards the universality of Newman's aims as now a source of institutional confusion rather than of theoretical guidance. Certainly the average "mission statement" as updated for the coming millennium exhibits a fashionable incoherence of aims, yet the very act of composing or recasting such a charter remains at least formally within the limits set down by Newman. One fears, certainly, to speculate what might come about without even our presently vestigial regard for these.

George M. Marsden (History, Notre Dame) appears to hold that we might well even now contemplate a return of sorts ("Theology and the University"). Noting how an originally haphazard process of curricular de-divinization has lately crystallized into a secular missionary zeal devoted to discouraging critical thought along all but certain prescribed avenues, Marsden appeals to an interesting impersonation Newman includes in one of the omitted essays on university subjects:

[Speaking for his opponents:] The proper procedure, then is not to oppose Theology, but to rival it. Leave its teachers to themselves; merely aim at the introduction of other studies, which, while they have the accidental charm of novelty, possess a surpassing interest, richness, and practical value of their own. Get possession of these studies, and appropriate them....(304)

Sara Castro-Klarén (Latin American Literature and Culture, Johns Hopkins) takes the academic "culture-wars" as the subject matter of her essay, "The Paradox of the Self in The Idea of the University." Rehearsing the arguments. customary among multicultural relativists wishing to disparage cultural chauvinists caught up in universalist pretensions, Castro-Klarén finds Newman deficient in allowing for mutual respect between differing, autonomous subjectivities. Happily, she is able partly to excuse his universalist tunnel-vision in the light of selected passages of iridescent prose, which, wrenched from their contexts, prove susceptible of a politically correct interpretation.

Perhaps the most straightforward essay at re-thinking Newman's conception in a way that goes beyond it is the contribution of George P. Landow (English and Art History, Brown). Only Landow reaches an escape velocity of sorts by breaking free of the bounds of spatial locality and written medium ("Newman and the Idea of an Electronic University"). Designating these as a "historical construct" after the manner of post-modern literary fashion, Landow sketches an ostensibly futurist vision of students and teachers who regard education more open-endedly than they presently do campus classroom book-learning. But the university he has in view seems "universal" in a sense going back beyond Newman's "place" of universal learning.

Newman of course knew that his conception of a university for teaching "universal knowledge" was an adaptation of the original meaning of "university," viz. a group of students that had voluntarily unionized, as it were, for such purposes as collectively demanding reasonable rents in a town. The effectiveness of a university in this sense depended on its ability to pack up and move elsewhere at will. By similar methods students could and did exact quality instruction as well:

Victorious over the townsmen, the students turned on "their other enemies, the professors." Here the threat was a collective boycott, and as the masters lived at first wholly from the fees of their pupils, this threat was equally effective. The professor was put under bond to live up to a minute set of regulations which guaranteed his students the worth of the money paid by each, We read in the earliest statutes (1317) that a professor might not be absent without leave, even a single day, and if he desired to leave town he had to make a deposit to insure his return. If he failed to secure an audience of five for a regular lecture, he was fined as if absent.... He must begin with the bell and quit within one minute after the next bell. He was not allowed to skip one chapter in his commentary, or postpone a difficulty to the end of the hour, etc., etc. (Charles Homer Haskins, The Rise of Universities, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1923, 9f.)

Dependent for their livelihood, teachers responded by associating as colleagues within "colleges" into which admission was restricted. Our university eventually emerged from an amalgamation of these associations, and it is to such a collective entity that Newman sought also to attribute a mission of universal or catholic learning. If an electronic university can achieve the latter under future conditions, it is perhaps also true that it will restore much of the real (not simply subjective) autonomy originally enjoyed by student bodies and faculty colleges--with the important difference that no overt act of association or physical relocation may any longer be necessary.

This development could prove awkward for institutions whose managers have invested disproportionately in areas secondary to an academic mission (e.g. monumental campus building programs or ancillary initiatives on a principle of caring estranged from a spirit of critical inquiry). Landow is sketchy in providing for our modern administrators, which raises a question what "place" there will be in the future for our vestigial medieval hierarchies of Rectors, Provosts, Deans (i.e. Deacons), et al. But the more prudent among these seem quick to move into the new realm (anticipated as a group perhaps only by the more properly guardian class of librarians). Doubtless even an open-ended, world-wide, weblike and free exchange of ideas will require a hypermanagement of some kind.

Landow spends some time dispelling the idea that computers will undermine what is presently left of faculty collegiality. But too systematic an embrace of an electronic university could of course distract students and teachers from the professional relationship of liberal learning that is their bond. Everything else in our university is for the sake of the "university" in this truest of senses. Computers can be of assistance, but at bottom they are simply instruments. In order for the university to continue as such, teachers must be able to teach and students to learn, lest a liberal education be finally replaced by slavish entertainment or even indoctrination. Only thus will the university remain what it is in principle: a unified community of teachers and learners with a unitary commitment to universal learning in acknowledgment of catholic principles for a coherent educational mission. It has been Newman's service to canonize this vision for us all, and the work of this re-edition is to place it anew before students and teachers alike.