In the debate about what needs to be done to make university education more coherent and more effective, no figure is cited more frequently than John Henry Newman, whose classic study The Idea of a University (1873) tackles educational questions that still exercise would-be reformers. Some of those questions include: whether the governing principle of university education should be utilitarian or nonutilitarian; whether teaching or research should predominate in the hierarchy of university priorities; and what truly constitutes university education.
Until now, the two most highly regarded books on Newman’s treatment of the subject were Fergal McGrath’s Newman’s University: Idea and Reality (1951) and Dwight Culler’s The Imperial Intellect: A Study of Newman’s Educational Ideal (1955). Now, in The ‘Making of Men,’ Paul Shrimpton contends that past studies of Newman’s educational achievement have suffered from failing to take into account the full scope of Newman’s educational endeavors, and he has written his own book to rectify that.
Deeply researched and persuasively argued, The ‘Making of Men’ is a major contribution to our understanding of Newman’s commitment to university education. It will enliven and refine all future discussions of the subject by encouraging readers to revisit not only Newman’s classic text but the practical challenges he addressed—first as fellow of Oxford’s Oriel College, and then as rector of the Catholic University in Dublin. Shrimpton draws on Newman’s copious correspondence and memoranda, as well as “accounts ledgers, buttery records, punishments books, timetables, rules and regulations, prospectuses, minute books, reports of all types, and a host of other documents,” all of which give The ‘Making of Men’ an admirable richness.
In addition, the book includes vivid pen portraits of the men who joined Newman in his educational undertakings. Of Aubrey de Vere, for example, who was a close associate of Newman in the 1850s, Shrimpton notes how the Anglo-Irish poet and convert found Newman “not an aloof intellectual” but a man of “sweet gravity, simple manners and plain speech.” In fact, his “quick sympathy and fierce moods before injustice” reminded de Vere of his countryman Edmund Burke. In such nicely chosen details, we can see why Newman commanded at once the respect and the affection of his colleagues.
The genesis of Newman’s interest in education began while he was a student at Trinity College, when Oxford was just emerging from the bibulous torpor about which Edward Gibbon wrote so memorably (“At the most precious season of youth, whole days and weeks were suffered to elapse without labor or amusement, without advice or account”). By the time Newman entered Trinity, the intellectual tone of the university might have improved but not the tastes of gentlemen commoners. Writing to his father, Newman described how he had accompanied fellow undergraduates to their rooms:
Once a fellow at Oriel, Newman set himself against this dissolute ethos by developing the moral and spiritual life of the undergraduates in his charge. Together with his friends Hurrell Froude and Robert Wilberforce he gave his tutoring a pastoral attentiveness—until the provost demanded that he either stop tutoring along these lines, which the provost feared would foster favoritism, or leave off tutoring altogether. Newman duly relinquished his tutorial duties, though he remained a redoubtable force in college life and continued to offer spiritual counsel to students and dons alike. One of these was Mark Pattison, who would go on to become rector of Lincoln College and a lifelong champion of the tutorial solicitude that Newman advocated.
Before converting to Roman Catholicism, Newman also sent a series of brilliant letters to the Times opposing a reading room sponsored by Sir Robert Peel and Lord Brougham that would exclude all books of theology from its shelves. Later published as The Tamworth Reading Room (1841), the letters attacked the cult of knowledge, which Newman saw as an outcrop of the relativist and atheist rationalism of the Enlightenment. That the cult was adopted by the father of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, did not make it any more palatable to Newman: Since the false god of knowledge still stultifies the study of the liberal arts, his objections to it remain compelling.
Newman would renew his criticism of the university’s misguided faith in knowledge in The Idea of a University, which he based on lectures he gave in Dublin in 1852. In one of the lectures, Newman took issue with the trifling omniscience that universities had begun to require of their students for “distracting and enfeebling the mind by an unmeaning profusion of subjects” and “implying that a smattering in a dozen branches of study is not shallowness . . . but enlargement.” Students were taught not a few things well but many things poorly, with the result that they left their colleges “frivolous, narrowminded, and resourceless.” Indeed, many left “so shallow as not even to know their shallowness.”
Yet Newman’s refusal to regard knowledge as the end of university education went beyond his contention that the mere accumulation of knowledge left the young uneducated. He also saw the inadequacy of such an end for the moral education of the young. Against any superficial reliance on knowledge per se, Newman extolled what he nicely referred to as “the sovereignty of Truth,” convinced that “error may flourish for a time; but Truth will prevail in the end.” Indeed, for Newman, “the only effect of error ultimately is to promote Truth”—a reassuring reminder to those who might otherwise despair of the manifold errors now entrenched in our current universities, where, as Steven Hayward recently reported, the ascendant “postmodern Left . . . openly rejects reason, objectivity, and truth as tools of oppression.”
Once in charge of the Catholic University in Dublin, Newman put many of his educational ideas to the test. While respecting the role that research should play in the university, he believed it should be pursued in academies that were close to, but outside, the university proper, where teaching should have pride of place. He encouraged his professors and heads of houses to take a pastoral interest in their charges; he made practical recommendations for remedial studies for undergraduates coming to the university unprepared for university work; and he gave students a degree of liberty that shocked the Irish hierarchy. In his Dublin lectures, Newman justified this latitude with a cogency that should appeal to those in our own midst who wish to roll back the salutary freedoms of students.
The results of Newman’s efforts were mixed. By all contemporary accounts, they were not as impractical as later critics charged. Nonetheless, the sense of shared purpose that Newman inspired in his professors notwithstanding, the Catholic University failed. Never securing the requisite charter to confer degrees, it did not sustain its enrollment.
Then again, the Irish considered the Catholic University too English, and the English considered it too Irish. And Newman never received the support he needed from Archbishop Paul Cullen, who distrusted the considerable role that Newman was prepared to give the laity in his university.
However, despite these challenges, the Catholic University that Newman designed and put into practice continues to be the model for all truly Catholic colleges today, and The Idea of a University remains the best book ever written on university education. Those interested in learning how these two enduring achievements came about will find this study an enthralling, enlightening read.
Edward Short is the author, most recently, of Newman and His Family.
