The Idea of the University in Newman, Oakeshott, and Strauss

J o h n Henry composed his famous work on Newman liberal educat ion and the university just at the m o m e n t when professionalization and specialization of university studies were initiating the transformation to the m o d e r n research multiversity, consti tuting the major challenge to the very tradition Newman was defending. The Idea of a University began in 1852 as nine lectures called "Discourses on University Education." There followed "Lectures and Essays on University Subjects" in 1858. Together, with revision, these reached final form in 1873 as the work we now read. Newman argued "that all branches of knowledge are connec ted together, because the subject-matter of knowledge is intimately uni ted in itself, as being the acts and the work of the Creator . . . . There is no science but tells a differen t tale, when viewed as a por t ion of a whole, from what it is likely to suggest when taken by itself, without the safeguard, as I may call it of others.'1 Newman had begun his lectures with a long defense of the necessary place of theology in the university curriculum, arguing that the university "cannot fulfill its object duly, such as I have described it, without the Church 's assist a n c e . . . [the university] still has the office of intellectual education; but the Church steadies it in the per formance of that office"(7). If liberal learning demands study of the whole and of the unity of knowledge, theology and religious study can be excluded only arbitrarily. Newman lays it down that "all knowledge forms one whole"(87). In our day, the though t of pursuing the unity of knowledge fades as the pursuit itself has disintegrated in practice, and the commi tmen t to harmonizing Reason and Revelation has only become more an object of academic suspicion than it had already become in Newman's time. The vocation of liberal learning to app rehend the unity of the Creation, has been overtaken by "science as a vocation," the positivist accumulat ion of knowledge in specialized fields of inquiry and the skeptical demythologizing of beliefs, as Mark Schwehn describes in Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America?