Book Review

Campus Recall

The 'Making of Men': The Idea and Reality of Newman's University in Oxford and Dublin
by Paul Shrimpton

Gracewing, 2014
(631 pages, $36.00, paperback)

reviewed by James A. Altena

In standard biographies of John Henry Newman, the four years from 1854 to 1858 he spent as first rector of the newly founded Catholic University of Ireland (CUI) in Dublin are generally glossed over and treated as a failed attempt to put into practice the ideals he articulated in his famous and influential 1852 lecture series, The Idea of a University: Defined and Illustrated. Paul Shrimpton's in-depth treatment of that period in Newman's life, a major addition to extant Newman scholarship that makes extensive use of unpublished archival source materials, aims to alter that perception and give Newman his due as a practical man of action as well as a theorist.

After an initial sketch of Newman's life up to 1850 that places special emphasis upon his experiences first as a student with tutors and then as a tutor to students, Shrimpton considers in turn the foundation of CUI, Newman's vision for the university, the organization and daily life of the fledgling institution, the mounting problems of maintaining CUI, and its parlous existence after Newman's departure until its final absorption in 1909 into University College Dublin (which became the far more successful National University of Ireland). This is followed by assessments of reasons for CUI's general failure and of Newman's educational legacy. Of these, the discussions of Newman's formative influences, his vision of higher education, and his legacy in this area form a theoretical skeleton to which the other facets add factual flesh.

Shrimpton argues that Newman's tutorial experiences at Oxford profoundly shaped his future theories of education. Lacking proper guidance as an undergraduate, Newman exhausted himself by overmuch study and suffered a crisis of confidence, resulting in a breakdown at his final oral exams, at which he barely achieved a passing result instead of the expected double First. Upon his acceptance into Oriel College, however, he received the beneficial mentoring of Richard Whately, later the Anglican archbishop in Dublin, and Edward Hawkins, who was elected provost of Oriel in 1828 over John Keble due in part to Newman's support.

Newman worked first as a private tutor from 1821 to 1826 and then as a college tutor at Oriel from 1826 until 1830, when he and his allies Hurrell Froude and Robert Wilberforce were deprived of pupils by Hawkins after they implemented significant changes in the tutorial system without first informing the provost and receiving authorization. Newman's experiences convinced him both that tutors were a necessity for university students, and that a tutor should not merely provide instruction but also mold the foundational intellectual and moral character of his charges.

Philosophy & Practice

Newman's mature views on university education were articulated piecemeal in The Idea of a University (a combination of a lecture series given in Dublin in 1852 as preparation for the founding of CUI, and occasional pieces written during his 1854–1858 rectorship) and in a further collection of essays now known as the University Sketches. At that time, the character of higher educational institutions was in considerable ferment. Whereas medieval universities had been centers of both teaching and research, by the eighteenth century they were mostly teaching institutions, with research conducted almost entirely in specialized professional academies and societies.

Due to the influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt in Berlin, however, an increasingly influential German model promoted universities as primarily institutions for advanced research. There was also rivalry between the three different primary purposes of university education—the pursuit of academic research, the specialized training for advanced professions (e.g., medicine and law), and the production of intellectually well-rounded persons for service to both church and state—and the three different primary methods of instruction—lectures, tutorials, and seminars.

Newman held that a university should be primarily devoted to teaching, though research should play a secondary supporting role, that university education has a pastoral dimension that goes beyond production of well-rounded persons to the fundamental formation of spiritual and moral character, and that the tutorial method of instruction is the key to this purpose. In his opening address on November 5, 1854, Newman exhorted the first group of CUI students:

 

. . . there is an education necessary and desirable over and above that which may be called professional. Professions differ, and what is an education for one youth is not the education of another; but there is one kind of education which all should have in common, and that which is distinct from the education which is given to fit each for his profession. It is the education which makes the man; it does not make physicians, surgeons, or engineers, or soldiers, or bankers, or merchants, but it makes men. It is that education which enables the man to adorn the place, instead of the place adorning the man. And this is the education for which you especially come to the University—it is to be made men.

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