O'Hear - The idea of a university

PROFESSOR ANTHONY O'HEAR laments the demise of John Henry Newman's idea of a university

“I protest to you, gentlemen, that if I had to choose between a so-called university, which dispensed with residence and tutorial superintendence, and gave its degrees to any person who passed an examination in a wide range of subjects, and a university which had no professors or examinations at all, but merely brought a number of young men together for three or four years, and then sent them away as the University of Oxford is said to have done some sixty years since, if I were asked which of these two methods was the better discipline of the intellect… which of the two courses was the more successful in training, moulding and enlarging the mind… which produced better public men, men of the world, men whose names would descend to posterity, I have no hesitation in giving the preference to that university which did nothing, over that which exacted of its members an acquaintance with every science under the sun.”

So Newman, for it is of course Newman, advocates a university which does “nothing”, in which young men (people?) simply live together for three or four years, and which by some mysterious alchemy enlarges the mind of its alumni, who then become better public men, some of whose names may even descend to posterity.

It is hardly surprising that no one of any importance today reads The Idea of a University, so counter-cultural is it. Yet Newman’s vision is a fine one, and one we are the poorer for losing sight of. I am not going to waste words in deploring the governmental culture of targets, modularity of courses and the obsessive examining and certifying of students, the dilution of standards and class resentment masquerading as access and outreach, quality assurance agencies which would not recognise real quality if it stared them in the face, research assessment exercises adding nothing to the knowledge, wisdom or even wit of mankind, ‘teaching and learning’ departments prizing threadbare pedagogical devices above culture and content , vice-chancellors posing as chief executives, or any of the other cancers currently strangling what is left of a once tolerable group of universities in this country.

We can deplore all of that, as we can rage against the philistinism of politicians (as if we had any right to expect anything else, having allowed universities to fall increasingly under their financial control and ideological diktat); but we need to have something else with which to compare today’s situation, to see why it is all so wrong.

A final preliminary remark: I am not going to accept it as an objection – the one that is always trotted out at this point – that no university in the history of the world (so it is said) ever corresponded in every detail to Newman’s idea; the question is not whether Newman’s Idea has ever been incarnated in every particular, but rather whether it is an ideal we might aim at, and at which, implicitly or explicitly, scholars did once aim.

Underlying Newman’s vision is the conviction that a certain sort of knowledge is its own end and is simply worth having for what it brings to the person who has it. In the great battle between Aristotle and Cicero on the one side, and Bacon and Locke and the utilitarians on the other, Newman is firmly on the side of knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge there certainly is, knowledge which in Bacon’s terms “improves man’s estate”, but there is another sort of knowledge too, that which responds to an Aristotelian sense of wonder, that which illuminates the mind which has it simply by virtue of its possession, and which, as a part of what is involved in human flourishing, requires no further justification. We are not on Earth just to survive and reproduce; as rational and reflective beings, knowing significant truths about the world and ourselves, and reflecting on them, is part of our dignity and vocation as human beings.

In terms of the distinction between education and training, Newman insists on the importance of education, where what is learned enlarges the mind and is learned because it enlarges the mind. In training, which is a perfectly justifiable activity, what is taught is taught because it is a means to some further end, such as transport, nutrition or health, and will cease to be taught when a different or better means is discovered. So we no longer teach mechanics how to design steam locomotives or surgeons how to use chloroform, but we do still teach Homer and Virgil (or, to be more accurate, we should).

In mentioning education, the next thing to note is that for Newman a university is first and foremost a place of teaching. A university will have scholars in it, and will need to have them, in order to teach and guide the young, but it is not a research institute. A university will primarily be geared to the enlargement of the minds of those young people who come to study and live in it. And it is enlargement of their minds which is at issue in a university. While universities may in various ways produce moral, or religious or utilitarian or social benefits, that is not what they are about. As we see in the current wrangling over access, their integrity as places of learning will be compromised if they are seen as laboratories of social engineering or as remedies for earlier failures of schooling, just as in the past their Newmanic role would have been compromised had they been forbidden to teach biblical criticism.

As to the content of university study, Newman himself does not go into great detail. He does, though, speak of four sources of knowledge: sense experience, intuition, testimony and abstract reasoning. To these will correspond the subjects of science, ethics, history, and mathematics and metaphysics. He also points out the importance of literature and the arts as ways of developing our sense of “the life and remains of natural man”, in comparison to the Book of Revelation, which in Newman’s view (although himself a distinguished theologian) presents a truncated version of man.

More generally, he takes the Kantian trilogy of God, Nature and Man as defining the ambit of what he calls ‘liberal knowledge’, while at the same time stressing the differences of approach in the various areas of knowledge: the difference between science, for example, which concentrates on what is external to us, and literature, which deals with ideas, feelings and the precise expression of men’s minds. Overall, it is clear that the subjects which feature in Newman’s university will be ones which, owing to their approach, their tradition, their canons of key works and their focus, can plausibly be seen as contributing significantly to our knowledge of the world, the soul and God.

At this point, a key element of Newman’s picture arises precisely from the differences between the different subjects and their approaches. All the key subjects we have suggested, and their subdivisions, have important things to tell us, but all take things from one point of view, and all are, to that extent, partial versions of the whole. Thus, to use some of Newman’s own examples, anatomy tells us about the body, but ignores the soul (or psychology, if you like); political economy tells us about wealth while prescinding from the morality involved; history (of the Jews, say) leaves out the doctrine and truth of salvation.

While Newman’s examples will not appeal to all, the sense he conveys of the effects of the intellectual division of labour is clear and correct. While we as a society need what each subject and approach tells us, and students need to acquire that sense of depth and intellectual commitment which stems from serious study, as individuals we can go into depth in only one or two subjects. But as individuals, if we are not to become mentally one-sided, even unbalanced, we also need to transcend the divisions. The university, which brings all the major subjects together, is above all the place where all may benefit from the necessary divisions of subjects, while at the same time overcoming them:

“This I consider to be the advantage of a seat of universal learning, considered as a place of education. An assemblage of learned men, zealous for their own sciences, and rivals of each other, are brought, by familiar intercourse and for the sake of intellectual peace, to adjust the claims and relations of their respective subjects of investigation. They learn to respect, to aid each other. Thus is created a pure and clear atmosphere of thought…”

…which, of course, is transmitted to their students. All involved, tutors and students will ideally, by virtue of living together and sharing in the life of the institution, be possessed of that “true enlargement of mind which is the power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values and determining their mutual dependence”. It is this true enlargement of mind which Newman sees as the characteristic gift of the university to its alumni, and which, by its nature as a community devoted to learning and teaching the best that has been thought and known in all areas of human importance to the intelligent and eager young, it is especially suited to give. For in their coming together and mixing with each other, the young people in the university will, above all, learn from each other: “the conversation of all is a series of lectures to each, and they gain from themselves new ideas and views, fresh matter of thought, and distinct principles for judging and acting day by day”.

I know from my own experience that the ideal Newman speaks of can be achieved, and, despite all the difficulties, is still being achieved in some places, at least as far as the young are concerned. But we need to appreciate the conditions in which it can flourish, which Newman would have understood, and which have been well expressed by Michael Oakeshott:

“The great and characteristic gift of the university was the gift of an interval… here [in the three or four years of a university degree] was the opportunity to exercise, and perhaps to cultivate, the highest and most easily destroyed of human capacities, what Keats called “negative capability”: “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable racing after fact and reason… and all this not in an intellectual vacuum, but surrounded by all the inherited learning and literature and experience of our civilisation…”

Both Newman and Oakeshott are insistent that what a university, uniquely, has to give to those able and fortunate enough to come within its walls, requires that its students are released from the pressures and cares of life outside, so that they can devote themselves to the free development of the mind. What a university has to give will not be achieved by what Newman calls the ideal systems of education which fascinate the imagination of the age, but far more by a self-denying ordinance on the part of those running them, leaving its scholars and students to develop their own forms of life and have their conversations, wherever they might lead. Unlikely as this may be in 2007, we who have benefited from something like the Newman-Oakeshott vision should do all we can to keep it alive for our successors, the young people of today.

Anthony O’Hear is Garfield Weston professor of philosophy and head of the department of education at the University of Buckingham. He is editor of the journal Philosophy and honorary director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. He is the author of numerous books, including Plato’s Children: The State We Are In (2006).

Footnote: John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University was originally given as ‘Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin’, and was first published in 1853. The quotations in this article are taken from Discourses V and VI.
The quotation from Michael Oakeshott is from his article ‘The Universities’, in The Voice of Liberal Learning, edited by Timothy Fuller, Yale University Press, 1989, p 102.