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treatment of that period in Newman's life, a major addition to extant Newman scholarship that makes extensive use of unpublished archival source materials, aims to alter that perception and give Newman his due as a practical man of action as well as a theorist.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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In contrast to the German concept of Bildung, or primarily autonomous intellectual self-formation by students, Newman strongly believed a university should act in loco parentis to nurture, guide, and protect its youthful charges. Drawing upon elements of both Oxford and the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, Newman sought to realize this at CUI through the adoption of a college system embedded within a larger university framework, with groups of students living together in lodging houses to forge a common identity and spirit, and through the fostering of a genius loci or ethos that combined the external guidance of formally codified discipline with an interior direction more informally and intangibly imparted by affective influence. Tutors were to be the primary agents of such personal formation through their service as intellectual and moral mentors. In Newman's words,

 

In this idea of a College Tutor, we see that union of intellectual and moral influence, the separation of which is the evil of the age. . . . A Catholic University will but half remedy this evil, if it aims only at professional, not at private teaching. Where is the private teaching, there will be the real influence.

Causes of Failure

Although Newman demanded, and mostly received, a free hand to organize and run CUI as he saw fit, it failed to thrive for several reasons. The first was financial, as the enterprise always remained a shoestring operation with uncertain funding. The second concerned institutional standing—CUI never gained a legal charter from the British government to grant accredited degrees.

A third concerned complex social factors. Newman understandably insisted on staffing the seminary with men he knew for its faculty, tutors, and officers; but these consequently were mostly English imports into an Ireland subjugated to English rule, and such interlopers faced latent suspicion and hostility despite being Catholics. Moreover, the extreme clergy/laity divide in Ireland fostered a presumption that CUI was ecclesiastically run. This suspicion, plus CUI's inability to grant accredited degrees, led the numerically small Irish gentry and professional classes preferentially to send their sons to the Protestant universities of Trinity in Dublin and Oxford, Cambridge, and London in England for social and professional advancement. The student body of CUI thus had a disproportionate number of English and continental European members.

Fourth, there were ecclesiastical complications, as the formation and control of CUI became part of larger power struggles within the Irish Catholic hierarchy. Archbishop Paul Cullen of Dublin bested Archbishop John MacHale of Tuam, but the latter then assumed an obstructionist role. A highly political animal, distrusted and distrustful ("I wonder he does not cook his own dinners," Newman once tartly observed), Cullen ostensibly supported Newman, but secretly undermined him with negative reports to the Vatican alleging laxity in management of finances and disciplining of students.

A fifth reason was ideological. Cullen and Newman's successors as rector after 1858 variously objected to his vision of a university governed by laity rather than by clergy, and to an ethos that relied primarily upon the intangible personal influence of tutors as mentors rather than on strict formal codes of student conduct. The lack of sympathy for Newman's vision led to his original project being progressively eroded and dismantled.

Finally, I would add a sixth reason that Shrimpton does not develop: a lack of long-term personal commitment by Newman himself, who stated at the outset that "my work would be to found various institutions," for "I do not aspire to the exercise of authority, or rule." Though his lack of ambition and self-promotion was laudable, he unfortunately failed to consider that, for such an enterprise to succeed, the assumption of such authority was of necessity a long-term duty.

Shrimpton's verdict on Newman's vision for CUI is that "the design was excellent, and what was flawed was the implementation," and he argues for its revival and implementation in universities today. Though ongoing secularization makes the realization of such a goal far more difficult than in Newman's time—the erosion both of a supportive Christian cultural ethos and of belief in an intrinsic moral conscience presents especially grave difficulties to the affective formation of character through personal influence—this call to cultural and spiritual arms deserves our prayerful support.