The Idea of a University. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 30, 1996 by Tracy Lee Simmons

THIS handsome reprinting of Newman's classic work on the nature of higher education marks the second in Yale's "Rethinking the Western Tradition" series, and stands as perhaps the best possible reminder that that tradition needs not so much rethinking as restating. When we talk today about the precipitous decline in education, we often forget the standard against which the ideal is judged.

Here it is. Published in final form in 1873, this book began as a series of lectures delivered in 1852 at the founding of a Catholic university in Dublin, to which was added another series a few years later to make the book we now have. Here we find Newman's justly famous discourses such as "Knowledge Its Own End" and "Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Professional Skill." Here Newman tackles issues that modern academics still haven't brought to the mat: the tension between education and training, the place of religion in learning, the struggle between religion and science, the ultimate mission of the university, and the cultural place of literature. The advantage of this edition is that it's well annotated, with an informative introduction and a useful glossary of period names and issues to smooth out the reading -- itself an index of what we've forgotten. The disadvantage is that it's an abridgement. Instead of the full work, we're provided with interpretive essays of varying purposes and quality. It's depressing, for example, to turn from the fresh breeze of Newman's prose to an academic disquisition by Sara Castro-Klaren on the "Paradox of Self," the very idea of which would spin Newman right out of his grave. Silliest of all is one called "Newman and the Idea of an Electronic University" by Brown University's George P. Landow, with sentences like one that characterizes educational institutions as "places defined by the nature of contemporary information technologies," making his essay a spirited exercise in missing the point. With considerable relief we thumb back to Newman himself to learn that true liberal learning forms within us "a habit of mind" which "lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom." Frank M. Turner, the book's editor, is right in saying that, to our ear, Newman's voice seems one "from an academic time warp." Reading him reminds us that we in the modern world may be neither the arrived nor the arriving in intellectual and cultural attainment, but the departed.