The Idea of a University
John Henry Newman
• John Henry Newman (21 February 1801 – 11 August 1890) was an English theologian, scholar and poet, first an
Anglican priest and later a Catholic priest and cardinal, who was an important and controversial figure in the religious history of England in the 19th century. He was known nationally by the mid-1830s,[11] and was canonised
as a saint in the Catholic Church in 2019.
• The Idea of a University by John Henry Newman is a collection of two books, derived from a variety of source materials, that are famous for their interrogation of three primary themes
pertaining to university life:
• 1) the nature of knowledge;
• 2) the role of religious belief in higher education; and
• 3) a defense of liberal education
• The idea of a university in which teaching and
research were combined in the search for impartial truth reached classic form in nineteenth-century and eventually became the dominant model.
• Other features of the model were intellectual freedom in research and teaching, university
autonomy, the growth of independent disciplines with their own standards and priorities, and internationalism.
• This concept of the university flourished when education was the preserve of a social elite.
• The Robbins report (1963) sought to democratize the
model without radically changing it, and until the 1980s university expansion was contained within this pattern, with polytechnics providing an alternative ideal.
• The end of the binary system in 1988 brought
together liberal and vocational forms of education.
• In Britain, unlike many other advanced countries, policy is opposed to the recognition of hierarchies within the higher education system, though in reality there are wide variations of social and intellectual prestige.
• Research has increasingly become detached from teaching, and the concentration of research funding widens the divisions within the system.
• Demands for research to be economically and socially relevant challenge accepted views of academic
freedom.
