Feb 21– What is a University? by John Henry Newman (1852)

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Feb 21– What is a University? by John Henry Newman (1852)

Summary: A university is a place where people with an interest in all different subjects gather to learn.

Commentary: This really can be divided into three parts of (to me) increasing debatability.

First: Universities should mix together people with different backgrounds, interests, etc. I think that's pretty straight forward and good, and I wish the schools I went to had taken a more active role in doing so. In undergrad, they kept us fairly segregated (dorm X was for people in X major or background, dorm Y for people in or from Y. Even our gen eds were often grouped by our major, so you couldn't escape even if you took a class outside your department). My grad program was remote, and I think the university really didn't care as long as the checks cleared and we didn't cause any scandals. From what I understood, they weren't  even sure what university services we actually qualified for... Obviously, interacting with other people, learning about other subjects, etc. is good for you. It's the whole point of this project!

Second: While books are useful, some things can only be learned through direct conversation with a teacher. I think this is a point we debate a lot today, and I often see people coming down 100% on one side or the other. If you don't have an advanced degree in it, you can't talk about it on the one side vs degrees are worthless, you can learn everything you'd ever need from Google on the other. In truth, neither one is right, and I think Newman engages with this more honestly than most. I will say that he seems to undervalue actual practice. The example he uses is behavior in high society. Obviously, having an instructor is helpful (probably more helpful than reading a book) but unless you actually go to a fancy ball or whatever, you'll never really master the skills.

Third: He uses religion as an example of why we need guiding principles in education. On the surface, pretty agreeable. But there's the age old question of "who gets to set the principles?" This is further complicated by his choice of example: religious instruction. According to him, Christianity is obviously true, and anyone who has any pagan beliefs needs to be deprogrammed. Obviously, you can't just casually throw that out without proof (in fact, uncertainty and necessity the of faith are key tenants of many Christian denominations) thus showing that there's a lot of  difficulty in attempting to define a higher principle for a field.