Lead, kindly light

His university failed, his attitude toward research and practical knowledge is out of date, yet John Henry Newman's 19th Century defence of liberal education remains relevant today.

On the evening of 14 April 1912, the Reverend Ernest Carter conducted a religious service aboard a steamship headed for New York. Marion Wright of Somerset, England, who was on her way to get married, sang the final hymn. It was drawn from John Henry Newman's poem, “The Pillar of the Cloud.”  

Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home–
Lead Thou me on!

These words were eerily prescient. Just as Marion finished singing, the Titanic hit an iceberg. The collision took 1517 passengers to a watery grave, but not Marion. She made it to America, married and lived to tell the tale. 

Universities are currently sailing through their own "encircling gloom." Unsure of their purpose, assailed by bureaucrats, journalists, and politicians, it sometimes seems as if universities are headed for an iceberg of their own. Can the thoughts of Saint John Henry Newman, dead for more than a century, offer them any navigational advice? On the surface, this may seem a strange question. Apart from provoking a nostalgic sigh from the more reactionary members of senior common rooms, Newman's views on the purity of learning for its own sake are hard to reconcile with the current predicament facing universities. Yet, practically every book written about higher education quotes him. What is responsible for his longevity? As I hope to show, the answer to this question is vital not just to universities but also to the future of nations.  Let's begin with Newman's ideas and the context in which he formulated them.

Newman's ideas in context

Newman's famous book, The Idea of a University, began with a series of lectures he delivered in Dublin in 1852. For the preceding 150 years, Catholics were forbidden from studying at Trinity College. The church hierarchy recently restored in Ireland wanted to establish an institution of higher learning for Catholics—like Notre Dame University, which was founded ten years earlier in the USA. 

The Archbishop of Dublin asked John Henry Newman to take on the task. The lectures collected in The Idea of a University represent Newman's attempt to justify the idea of a Catholic university to the Dublin community. A justification was necessary because Dubliners held decidedly sceptical views of the proposed university and Newman himself. Some distrusted him because he was an Anglican convert who was considered doctrinaire on liturgical matters. At the same time, Newman's belief that universities should eschew practical employment skills troubled parents who worried about how their children would support themselves. 

Undeterred, Newman attacked the utilitarian view of education, which values a university for its practical products—work-ready graduates, scientific discoveries, and ideas for new businesses. He did not deny that these things were valuable, but he saw them as secondary. For Newman, the real purpose of a university was to develop "gentlemen" who "raise the intellectual tone of society" (women, alas, were not part of his vision). His new university would abjure practical learning, banish research to special institutes and allow the Catholic religion to infuse the teaching of all subjects. 

Newman claimed that the model for his proposed university was 18th and early 19th century Oxford University, but his view of Oxford was highly idealised. In those years, Oxford was profoundly anti-intellectual. Adam Smith, the gentle Scottish genius, described the Oxford colleges of that time as: 

Sanctuaries in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices found shelter and protection after being hunted out of every other corner of the world.

Oxford was also snobby and exclusive, as was Newman. When he was at Oxford, Newman opposed awarding postgraduate degrees to anyone who was not a member of the Anglican Communion (a stance he may have regretted after converting to Catholicism). In truth, the Oxford colleges of Newman’s time were little more than "finishing schools" designed to prepare the slow-witted second sons of the aristocracy for a living in the established church. 

Not surprisingly, these old-style colleges did not provide viable models for 19th century Dublin. Newman managed to get a Catholic university started, but it never flourished. After a few years, it was absorbed into University College. Newman left Ireland and never returned. 

Today's academics share few, if any, of Newman's values. They do not see religion as central to teaching, they would never banish professional courses, and they are firm in their belief that research is vital to a university. Yet, academics continue to turn to Newman for advice about the mission and practice of higher education in the twenty-first century. In his book, What is a University For?, Stefan Collini attributes Newman's longevity to the persuasive power of his evocative "poetry, oratory, and liturgy." But, it's not only Newman's prose style that keeps him relevant; it is also his message—his vigorous defence of liberal education in the age of money. 

Liberal education in the age of money

We live in an age in which we measure everything in dollars and cents, including higher education. Want to make a good living? Have you considered our course on golf course management? How about surfing science? Interested in a trendy profession? No problem: universities chase every fad. 

Newman was one of the first to see the way things were going: 

Now, this is what some great men are very slow to allow…They argue as if everything, as well as every person, had its price; and that where there has been a great outlay, they have a right to expect a return in kind...With a fundamental principle of this nature, they very naturally go on to ask, what there is to show for the expense of a University; what is the actual worth in the market of the article called "a Liberal Education," on the supposition that it does not teach us definitely how to advance our manufactures, or to improve our lands, or to better our civil economy. 

But not even Newman could have guessed just how far such thinking would go. Once justified by a desire to understand our world and our place in it, we now judge scientific research by its commercial "impact." The arts and humanities used to be about the growth of the human spirit. In the age of money, they have become business plans for "creative industries," which are judged by the size of the profits they produce. 

Having accepted that they are marshalling yards for life's gravy train, it is not surprising that universities market their courses by boasting about how much money their graduates earn. It's not just universities and students that value education in financial terms; the Australian government does too. According to Australian federal budget papers, the purpose of universities is "to grow the knowledge-based economy," as if somewhere on earth there exists an economy based on ignorance. (Clichés such as the "knowledge-based economy" always bring to mind Goethe's famous quip in Faust: "When ideas fail, words come in very handy.”)

Some universities have sought to calculate their exact "value" in dollars and cents. The Lord, being merciful, sent economists to help them. According to KPMG, an accounting firm, every dollar spent on higher education produces a return of 15%, which makes everyone in society better off. Sounds miraculous, and it would be if it were true. Unfortunately, as Alison Wolf showed in her book Does Education Matter? there is no simple, direct relationship between the amount of education in a society and its future growth rate.

Switzerland is a wealthy country, yet it invests a lower percentage of its national wealth in higher education than does Poland. France, a developed country, invests less than Chile, a developing one. One of the ten largest economies globally, Brazil achieved strong economic growth while spending less than any OECD country on its universities. Hong Kong grew rich with a tiny university sector, whereas Russia, a country with many universities, stagnated. The UK is home to many of the world's leading universities, yet its economy is under pressure. 

Assessing the value of universities by their contribution to the GDP is what philosophers call a "category error." Of course, universities contribute to the economy; so does Shakespeare. Tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon spend millions per year on hotel rooms, meals, and coffee mugs with quotes from Hamlet. The wine sold during intervals at the Globe Theatre amounts to more than a hundred thousand dollars. Should we conclude that Shakespeare is valuable because he helps to sell books, coffee mugs, and wine? Of course not. Do we take our children on holiday to the Great Barrier Reef because tourism is essential to the Queensland tax base? Do we invite friends over for a glass of wine because we want to help vineyards become rich? Oscar Wilde's words bear repeating: we seem to know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Newman retains his appeal because he eloquently resisted the idea that we should measure higher education in financial terms. He argued instead for a higher purpose: 

University training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true 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.

We do not have to take Newman's word for this. Carefully conducted studies have found that in countries where voting is not compulsory, university graduates are more likely to vote than non-graduates. In all countries, graduates are less likely to commit crimes and more likely to volunteer to participate in public debate. Graduates are also more tolerant toward minorities and migrants than the average citizen.

Universities demean and diminish their work when they construe their aim as only making money. It is the reason Newman's arguments remain popular.  

Newman's modern relevance

Despite his eloquence, Newman was wrong about practical knowledge. Universities are right to be concerned with preparing students for paid work; a fulfilling career is part of a good life. But there is a problem; the skills required for employment today are not necessarily the ones society will need in the future. Students leaving university this year will retire around 2065. We don't know what the world will look like next year, let alone 2065. All we can be sure of is that the world will change. 

To prepare graduates for an ever-changing future, universities need to do more than teach them a narrow set of vocational skills—how to keep accounts, work computers or draw a blood sample. They also need to help graduates develop traits that allow them to keep learning. In Newman's words, the goal of higher education is to:

Open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression.

In contrast to job-related skills, Newman’s skills never become obsolete.

Universities short-change students when they focus just on money. If universities do their jobs properly, graduates acquire more than just job skills. They learn about themselves. They learn what they consider essential and what is trivial; they learn what to mock and what to take seriously, what to live for and what is worth dying for.

Unfortunately, much has been lost from higher education in the age of money. Some modern writers claim that education has lost its soul. The Lost Soul of Higher Education by Ellen Schrecker and Harry R. Lewis' Excellence Without a Soul are two recent examples. I don't think I have ever heard any of my academic colleagues utter the word soul, at least not in connection with university learning. Yet soul is precisely the right word. Our universities have made a Faustian bargain. Like the scholar in Goethe's play, they have traded our souls for money, and such transactions rarely become win-win propositions. 

It's not too late to turn things around; Newman provides a way for the university to reclaim its soul. His university may have failed, and his attitudes toward research and practical knowledge belong to a different age. Still, John Henry Newman's defence of a liberal education remains apposite today, a kindly humanistic light amid the encircling gloom.

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Parts of this article were adapted from “Higher Education: Beyond the Bottom Line” which appeared in A Love of Ideas, edited by Helen Sykes and also from “Cardinal Newman and the Modern University,” which appeared in Connor Court Quarterly.