Serie mensual de artículos del Chronicle of Higher Education sobre la universidad en la literatura. Tercer artículo dedicado a John Henry Newman, La Idea de la Universidad.
Rereading the University Classics, Part 3
By Kai Hammermeister, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 10, 2010
Editor’s Note: This is the third in a monthly series intended to introduce new generations of faculty members and administrators to a core set of classic books about higher education and its institutions. The first two columns are here and here.
John Henry Newman’s 1852 collection of lectures and essays, The Idea of a University, goes to great length to defend the inclusion of theology in the curriculum of the then-new Dublin unversity. Newman, who had converted to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism, was the driving force behind the university’s founding and its first rector. For American universities, teaching theology was never an option, and thus many of Newman’s efforts seem to evaporate instantly. Yet the way he advocates the inclusion of religious instruction contains ideas that are applicable to today’s curricular debates.
“I shall insist on the high theological view of the University,” Newman declares, because, without theology, the curriculum of a university remains incomplete. As the name implies, a university must transmit to its student body all fields of learning. Leaving one out would collapse the notion of universal knowledge. “All knowledge forms one whole, because its subject-matter is one; for the universe in its length and breadth is so intimately knit together, that we cannot separate off portion from portion, and operation from operation, except by a mental abstraction.”
Newman seems to admit to a certain arbitrariness in the establishment of individual disciplines. Therefore the universe of knowledge must remain incomplete and ever changing. Yet the most pertinent idea in his musings is the claim that not every university has to reflect the entire universe of knowledge.
“Though I have spoken of a University as a place for cultivating all knowledge, yet this does not imply that in matter of fact a particular University might not be deficient in this or that branch, or that it might not give especial attention to one branch over the rest.”
Applying Newman’s arguments to today’s academe might go something like this: Universities today must specialize more than ever before. There is little reason that every research university needs to support its own German department or research unit in optometry. Rather, universities should cooperate to distribute research and teaching specializations across each state and across the nation. The increased flexibility required from graduate students will be repaid with better instruction and improved chances within the job market. Greater specialization will allow universities to aim for excellence in all of their units rather than having to support a large number of middling departments that merely round out the picture.
The other major concern for Newman is the kind of education that “trains the intellect in its own function.” Because the university must provide professional education, while also producing “good members of society” and transmitting the “art of social life,” it must devote part of its efforts to liberal education. “A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life,” he writes, “of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom; or what in a former Discourse I have ventured to call a philosophical habit.”
In fact, more so than educating the engineer or the economist, “a University training … aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life.”
Not only Stanley Fish will be happy to see many of those lofty goals absent from the mission statements of our universities. What remains a shared legacy at almost all of our institutions of higher learning, however, is the emphasis placed on general education that is meant to develop a critical, broad, resilient, and adaptable mind in the student. Unfortunately, our practice of cultivating such “philosophical habit” is mostly a tepid compromise that fails to achieve its aims.
The general practice for accomplishing the breadth of learning that we came to label general education is to require the student to select a number of courses from several different areas like history, mathematics, natural sciences, languages, and the arts. In other words, our general-education requirement is a distribution requirement. Yet how well those courses fulfill their function of broadening the student’s mind appears to depend to an undue degree on the ability of the instructor to interest the students in a field outside their chosen specialization. The mere fact of taking such a course is not causally connected to a widening appreciation for the material.
Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University, makes much the same point in Our Underachieving Colleges: “If colleges cannot find the right professors, however, or will not give them the support they need, it would be better to abandon the quest for breadth entirely than to perpetuate the sham of pretending to accomplish something intellectually valuable by installing an ungainly compromise to win approval from a reluctant faculty or by forcing students to rummage for themselves among long lists of courses created for very different purposes.”
The same holds true for our language requirements. We can’t defend those requirements either by pointing to their practicality (since speaking English is the much more effective choice in almost all situations), or by claiming that familiarity with a foreign language will increase the student’s understanding of the culture in which that language is spoken. There is simply no evidence that second-language acquisition is connected to transcultural awareness and tolerance, as a major study on this subject has pointed out (see Alice C. O’Maggio’s “Teaching Language in Context”).
If Newman’s project of a liberal education is meant to be more than a frustatingly vague ideal that is poorly executed based on largely unfounded assumptions, we must begin a fresh discussion about our general-education curriculum. Neither faculty members nor administrators demonstrate that they have mastered the “philosophical habit” when they perpetuate general education for all the wrong reasons.
Kai Hammermeister is an associate professor of German at Ohio State University.