The Long Shadow of Cardinal Newman:
New Ideas on the University

Jaroslav Pelikan
The Idea of the University: A Reexamination
Yale University Press, 1992

John Henry Newman
The Idea of a University
Ed. Frank M. Turner
Yale University Press, 1996

When John Henry Newman was summoned to Ireland to establish the country's first Roman Catholic university in 1851, he went willingly. The Oxford-educated Newman had recently converted to Catholicism and was eager to place his scholarly and theological training in the service of his new faith. He outlined his vision for the new university in a series of lectures and essays which he later revised and published as The Idea of a University in 1873. Although the project quickly foundered amid weak clerical support, curriculum debates, and a circumspect Catholic laity, Newman's vision endured. Indeed, it has profoundly shaped the way we have thought and written about the university ever since.

Each of the books reviewed here reexamines Newman's text but adopts a decidedly different approach for discussing its contemporary relevance. The first, The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (1992), is written by Jaroslav Pelikan, a distinguished historian of theology and former dean of Yale's Graduate School. Pelikan's book originated as a series of lectures on "The Future of the University" given at Yale in 1990-91; it followed a wave of inflammatory, highly partisan academic critiques such as Profscam (1988), Tenured Radicals (1990), and Illiberal Education (1991), which were sparked by the publication of Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (1987). "University-bashing," according to Pelikan, has become both popular sport and big business. The university is under attack from radicals and conservatives alike and is undergoing a severe "crisis of self-confidence" (12). As a means of crisis control, Pelikan proposes a reexamination of Newman's Idea of a University. Using Newman's text as a touchstone, he examines the assumptions underlying university practices today and deduces from them a set of unassailable intellectual virtues. "[I]t is an unjustifiable capitulation to intellectual and moral relativism," he argues, "to conclude, as many contemporaries seem to have done, that a consensus about what seem almost unavoidably to be called 'values' is beyond our grasp" (48). Focusing on the "idea of the university rather than the institution," Pelikan endeavors to transcend the relativism and the competing ideologies surrounding issues such as affirmative action and the Western canon debate.

The book is structured in three parts: a preliminary discussion of the principles on which Newman's ideal university is based; an explication of the university's mission in which the implications of these principles are fleshed out; and a concluding consideration of the university's role in society. Each of the three sections consists of six short essays which take their titles from a key phrase in Newman. As the subject and structure of the book suggest, Pelikan is a staunch admirer of Newman and claims "a deep-seated scholarly affinity with him" (8). Like Newman, Pelikan has devoted his scholarly life to the study of early Christian doctrine and taken a similar, frustrating turn at university administration. But unlike Newman, Pelikan is an exponent of the modern research university, and this leads him to revise Newman's definition in several ways. First, he excises the theological component of Newman's argument, stating, "it is of course not mandatory to share his theological stance if one wants to engage him in dialogue about the idea of the university" (9). Indeed, there are few nowadays who would share Newman's stance. The Roman Catholic doctrine of God was central to his idea of the university. It was a science and as such a necessary prerequisite to the "teaching of universal knowledge" which was the university's sole mission. In addition, Pelikan revises Newman's exclusive emphasis on teaching. Teaching is subordinated to research in Pelikan's model, which is based on the nation's top research institutions with their undergraduate colleges, graduate and professional schools, research libraries, and academic presses. This limits the scope of Pelikan's discussion, however, as there are only about fifty such universities in the country, and they enroll a mere ten percent of the total student population.¹

As a means of determining the principles underlying the modern university, Pelikan applies Newman's "invaluable habit of pushing things up to their first principles" (25). Belief in the attainability of first principles has been deeply compromised by relativism, but "first principles and assumptions are always present whether they be recognized or not" (30). Among Pelikan's primary intellectual principles or virtues are the commitment to free and open inquiry, intellectual honesty, discipline of mind, and a "sustained, if now significantly chastened, trust in rationality and its processes" (50). These rather sweeping terms are given specific connotations. "Discipline of mind," a phrase taken from the title of one of Newman's essays, connotes a type of asceticism that harkens back to monastic notions of self-denial. Advocating a "no pain, no gain" approach to scholarship, Pelikan stresses the "correlation between the fulfillment that comes out of scholarship and the ascetic discipline that goes into it" (55). The personal cultivation of these intellectual virtues, along with the willingness to tolerate diverse beliefs without sacrificing conviction, is what distinguishes the university as a true "community of scholars" (54). Equally important, the university should dedicate itself to the principle of "knowledge for its own sake." Liberal education rather than professional training is the university's mission, argued Newman, defining liberal education as "a process of training by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture" (71). Pelikan adopts Newman's conception of "knowledge for its own sake" wholesale and fails to consider whether such knowledge–completely unsubjective and free of any ideological inflection–can even exist or whether it isn't always a priori embedded in political and cultural subjectivities. Pelikan discusses the relevance of this conception of knowledge for the modern university, citing the growing tension between the aims of liberal and professional education. Today, the economic incentives encouraging students to specialize early are formidable, as are the rising costs of a university education. How can the university reconcile the need for general education on the one hand and specialization on the other? One way out of this dilemma, argues John Ralston Saul in The Unconscious Civilization , is to rethink the educational time table.² Westerners have added an average of twenty-five years to their life expectancy in this century alone, but educational patterns have remained fundamentally unchanged. "Why not take five to ten years from the end of a life and transfer it to the beginning?" The question bears considering. A four-year undergraduate education cannot realistically provide both liberal knowledge and professional know-how. What it can do is provide a comprehensive introduction to learning, one that treats education as a life-long process rather than an end product and provides students with the intellectual tools to deal effectively with the challenges and complexities of contemporary life.

Pelikan moves in part two from first principles to the "business of the university," which he views as fourfold: the advancement of knowledge through research, the extension of knowledge through teaching, the diffusion of knowledge through scholarly publication, and the instruction of vocational skills in professional programs (76). Here he revises Newman's emphasis on teaching to make research of primary importance. Newman argued that teaching universal knowledge was the sole mission of the university. Research is essentially incompatible with this aim; a professor "who spends his day in dispensing his existing knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either leisure or energy to acquire new [knowledge]" (81). Acknowledging the validity of Newman's argument, Pelikan suggests ways for moving beyond this dichotomy. The conception of learning from a teacher as the "passive reception of communicated knowledge must be replaced or at any rate accompanied by active participation in the processes by which knowledge is advanced" (93). Conversely, the conception of research as a process of pure discovery should be expanded to acknowledge the contribution that undergraduate teaching makes to scholarly writing and publishing. A more symbiotic approach that integrates rather than segregates the advancement and extension of knowledge is needed.

Pelikan concludes in part three with a consideration of the university's duties to society. This includes discussion of its regional, national, and international obligations, and given the broad sweep of coverage, Pelikan's conclusions are understandably rather vague: "even the most ardent traditionalist must never forget that the university is a staging area for the future, devoted not only to 'the embalming of dead genius' but to 'the endowment of living [genius]' (148). Reflecting on the university's role in affecting social change, he questions "[w]hat part, if any, will the institutions of learning, which produce the leaders of revolutions, play–or what part should they play, or can they play, or should they be conscious of playing–in the process of revolutionary social change?" (159). This accumulative speculation is characteristic of Pelikan's approach throughout the book and ultimately disappoints in focusing on untethered, abstract ideals rather than the interplay between the idea and reality of the university. In addition, Pelikan's close identification with his subject proves problematic. The book is a deeply personal one, "the outcome of a scholarly and theological dialogue with John Henry Newman that has been going on my entire lifetime" (8). While this makes for a congenial and companionable dialogue, Pelikan's uncritical acceptance of Newman's views and the ideological assumptions underlying them limits the usefulness of his study.

Readers seeking a more penetrating appraisal of Newman's text will welcome a new edition of The Idea of a University published by the Yale University Press last year. This exemplary volume reprints the greater part of Newman's 1873 text with a series of scholarly essays that examine the text from diverse, contemporary perspectives. Edited by Frank Turner, the volume is another in the "Rethinking the Western Tradition" series which features new editions of canonical works with full textual support (author biography, glossary, discussion questions, etc.). It is perhaps due to Jaroslav Pelikan, who serves on the series' editorial board, that we owe the appearance of Newman's Idea of a University so early in the series. The five contributors to the volume are leading scholars who, like Newman, have taught, published, and served as university administrators. Historian Martha McMacklin Garland begins by situating Newman's transcendent vision of the university within the context of early nineteenth-century English educational institutions. In contrast to Pelikan, Garland finds "much that is confusing if not actually confused" in Newman's text. She suggests the work's profound influence should be seen as "a reflection more of the reputation of the author than of the work itself" (265). The tensions in Newman's discourses stem from the complex circumstances surrounding his founding of the Catholic university. His mistaken assumption that the university would be for all Catholics (not just Irish Catholics), coupled with divergent expectations by ecclesiastical authorities and the Catholic laity for the project, created conflicting agendas from the outset. More telling was Newman's decision to model the university on Oxford's classical curriculum. For it was this conception of undergraduate education that, when merged with the German research-oriented model of the university introduced in America in the late nineteenth century, produced the seeds of the present conflict between liberal and professional education.

While present-day universities have forsworn Newman's quest in universal knowledge, many do require a core curriculum in the liberal arts. The actual implementation of this requirement often fails, however, according to Garland, in part because faculties "fight fierce political battles, dividing into ideological camps that either vehemently oppose or vigorously support traditional parts of the curriculum just because they are traditional" (280). Opposition to the traditional Western canon is more substantive than Garland's assessment allows, but her assertion that universities should be able to provide rationales for how their core curriculum coheres and place greater emphasis on the integration of knowledge is a valid one. As knowledge becomes ever more specialized and curriculum debates intensify, students share increasingly little intellectual common ground. In such an environment, free and open discussion of issues becomes more difficult as dialogue gives way to decree or worse—withdrawal and silence. This is happening not only among students, but also between faculty and administration, and is a cause for real concern. One thinks of the recent open letter by Professor Steven Zipperstein (Stanford Report [May 21, 1997]: 4) calling for a conference in which "faculty, students, deans, provost and president alike would have an opportunity to hear and openly debate new models, weigh their implications and argue together about what Stanford will look like in the next century." The danger, as university administrations take on the traits and practices of the corporate culture around them, is a growing gap between administration and faculty that will eventuate in two camps, namely management and labor. When that happens, warns A. Bartlett Giamatti, "we will have made the university another product of an industrial society instead of the ethical center by which culture is transmitted and in which independent thinking is done."³

Editor Frank Turner follows Garland's essay with a discussion of Newman's influence on post World War II higher education. He addresses a number of issues, most notably the contemporary relevance of Newman's religious thought, an aspect that critics and even admirers such as Pelikan routinely "ignore, downplay or excise" (286). Faced with the task of instituting a liberal course of study within a distinctly religious institution, Newman responded, in essence, by issuing "a call to Irish Catholics to abandon their religious and nationalistic provincialism and to look to a wider world in which to realize their talents and ambitions" (298). Relating this approach to current trends, Turner cites diverse interest groups within contemporary universities that advocate "retreat into provincialisms of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or some other form of commutarian identity [sic]," and concludes that such "exclusionist tendencies stand in direct opposition to liberal learning...." (298). Echoing Pelikan's emphasis on the need for free and open inquiry, Turner stresses that academic discourse must be pluralistic while avoiding the tendency toward provincialism.

Religious historian George Marsden explores the theological aspect of Newman's thought from another perspective. He traces the decreasing role of religion in higher education since Newman's day and questions the current presumption that allowing one's religious orientation to enter into the scholarly realm is "unscientific, unprofessional, and inappropriate" (307). If ethnicity, race, and gender get equal voice within the university, why not religion? Put another way, does the university's acceptance of leftist fundamentalism mean that we now extend the same right to fundamentalists of the Christian right and prepare to add creationism to the curriculum? In my opinion no, for as Marsden points out, scholarly research in all cases must adhere to widely accepted standards of evidence and argument. But that scholars can and often do subscribe to strong social or ideological commitments while maintaining the highest scholarly standards is borne out by feminist and Marxist members of the academy alike. To some extent, "[all] scholarship takes place in the context of the social location, assumptions, prior commitments and religious beliefs of the scholar" (308), and the question becomes to what degree we acknowledge these commitments and permit them to enter into academic discourse. As both Marsden and Turner ably argue, the role of religion as a social and cultural practice deserves a more thorough investigation in relation to the ongoing debates on cultural diversity.

Latin Americanist Sara Castro-Klarén explores Newman's relevance for the present multicultural and Western canon controversies. In championing the inclusion of Roman Catholic theology in a course of study when no such program existed, Newman was arguably something of a revolutionary. He made "a radical claim for the new subject—indeed, a minority subject—and for legitimating religious ideas which British society generally spurned" (319). This radicalism was at the same time bounded by a reactionary impulse, for Newman, in keeping with the Victorian attitudes of his time, was a devout ethnocentrist. Civilization invariably meant Greece and Rome and other cultures merited little in the way of serious study, as evidenced by his remarks on Chinese culture: "I am not denying of course the civilization of the Chinese, for instance, though it be not our civilization; but it is a huge, stationary, unattractive, morose civilization. Nor do I deny a civilization to the Hindoos, nor to the ancient Mexicans...[but] none of them will bear a comparison with the Society and the Civilization which I have described as alone having a claim to those names" (325). Castro-Klarén moves beyond the obvious ethnic and gender biases of Newman's "Dear Gentlemen" addresses⁴ to examine the ideology underlying his conception of literature. Writing is for Newman a creative, autonomous activity and stands in marked contrast to the passive, receptive nature of reading. This mid-Victorian conception effectively denies the reader a role in the creation of literary meaning. While belief in the fixed objectivity of the text went unquestioned in Newman's day, for us today a much more hermeneutic discussion is required, one that acknowledges the act of reading as interpretive, provisional, and laden with presuppositions. Like many of his contemporaries, Newman did not possess a "reciprocity of cultural and intellectual respect within the study of literature, which arises from a mutual recognition of subjectivities of persons from different backgrounds and experiences" (261). Castro-Klarén essay's deftly teases out the ideologies underlying Newman's argument and contextualizes them within the culture of mid-Victorian Britain. It provides a balanced critique that recognizes Newman's limitations without obscuring the magnitude of his vision.

Far-thinking though he was in some respects, Newman could not have foreseen the way cyberspace would transform the life of the university. Today, students and faculty communicate via e-mail, consult library catalogues on-line, and read digital texts on the Web. In the volume's final essay, "Newman and an Electronic University," George Landow explores the ways this new information technology is changing higher education and considers some of the implications. Today's university is for Landow primarily "a place defined by the nature of contemporary information technologies." He traces how revolutions in information technologies–first "the spoken word, then the written, and with Gutenberg the printed version, and now the digital word" (340)–have altered conceptions of the university. More specifically, the advent of the digital word is forcing a reappraisal of traditional concepts such as intellectual property, scholarly community, and institutional loyalty. Landow is highly optimistic about the future of new educational technologies and tends to gloss problems and questions concerning the ultimate value of such resources. One thinks, for example, of the recent hype about hypertext, the electronic text format that allows readers to move through texts in a non-linear fashion while also connecting to other on-line texts and information. Although it sounds impressive, even Landow must admit that the approach is "not particularly novel, since it is, after all, pretty much what skilled readers in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities do regularly" (347).

While it may be too soon to tell whether the Internet will effect as radical a transformation as Gutenberg's printing press, Landow's essay addresses many of the critical issues. Taken together, the five interpretive essays in this volume offer an engaging, expansive dialogue with Newman's Idea of a University . Their stark juxtaposition in tone and character with Pelikan's dialogue sets the two in high relief and prompts a final word on the ultimate relevance of these two projects for the future of the university. To give Pelikan his due, his deduction of first principles is erudite and eloquent and attests once more to the validity of engaging with intellectual tradition and method. His project is a nostalgic one, concerned with looking back rather than forward, however, and as the collection of interpretive essays makes clear, this approach has limited relevance for the present discussion. Newman's Catholic university was, after all, an abject failure, and serves to remind us that ideals cannot meaningfully guide the practices and policies of the university if they are hopelessly out of touch with the institutional reality.

Linda Zimmerman

Notes

(1)  Henry Rosovsky, The University: An Owner's Manual (New York: Norton, 1990) 36.

(2) John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (New York: Free Press, 1997) 176.

(3)  A. Bartlett Giamatti, A Free and Ordered Space: The Real World of the University (New York: Norton, 1988) 44. Having served as President of both Yale University and the National Baseball League, the late Giamatti knew well of what he spoke. See also Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), for an extensive, recent treatment of the deleterious effects of corporatism and consumerism on the university.

(4)  Women were not admitted into British universities until c.1870 and were not permitted to receive degrees until nearly forty years later; Oxford first awarded degrees to women in 1920, Cambridge in 1921.