The conservative ‘Idea of a University’

It is well-attested that the dominant rationale of contemporary universities is satisfying the current needs of the economy, bringing about social change and promoting social justice, that the political culture of universities is to the Left, and that much of university teaching in the arts and social sciences relentlessly highlights the negative in Western cultural traditions.

The dominance of a progressive liberal ‘Idea of a University’ should not, however, let us forget that there is a conservative ‘Idea of a University’ waiting in the wings ready for the opportunity to reassert itself when the occasion arises. This article gives a brief summary of some of the forms that this ‘Idea’ has taken.

Most of the proponents of a conservative ‘Idea of a University’ that I shall be mentioning have not been self-proclaimed ‘conservatives’. In talking about conservatism I am doing so in the broad sense in which the French theorist of conservatism Jean-Philippe  Vincent describes it as a ‘style’ or ‘habit of thought’ rather than as the ‘system of belief’ outlined by Roger Scruton.[1]

A 2,500 year-old tradition

For most of the thousand years in which European universities have existed their purpose has been to transmit a legacy of knowledge and understanding using methods which have their origins in the education developed by Plato and Aristotle 1,500 years earlier in 5th century BC Athens. The Romans called this a ‘liberal’ education, one for a free man and for the sake of his improvement as a being with a mind and a soul, rather than for any practical or occupational purpose.  It was a classical education based in the Latin and Greek languages and in Christian theology. It changed very slowly over the centuries. If Aquinas, who taught at the university in Paris in the thirteenth century, were to have been transported to Oxford in the nineteenth century when John Henry Newman (the future Cardinal) was teaching there, he would have quickly felt at home. So great have been the changes in universities from the mid-twentieth century onwards that were Newman to be transported from  nineteenth-century Oxford to a twenty-first century university he would be completely lost.

A university education should be mostly about ‘general culture’: Newman, Arnold and Mill

Cardinal Newman is the first and possibly greatest of those writers who over the last two hundred years have thought long and deep about universities and whose ideas about university education I shall be calling ‘conservative’.  His The Idea of a University (1852) makes a powerful case for a university education as ‘an end in itself’. Its prime function should be intellectual rather than moral. A university should be  a place for the transmission of a general culture, what he called  ‘universal knowledge’, and, more importantly, for the development of ‘Thought or Reason exercised upon (this) knowledge’. It should not be a place for research or professional education. Although a university’s purpose should be the development of the individual this did not mean that Newman saw it as lacking in utility, as a society led by people with well-formed minds, he argued, was likely to be a better society than one that was not. His book defines with sophistication what it means by ‘intellectual excellence’ in ways still relevant today. [2]

The mid-nineteenth century in England was a fruitful place for speculation about university education as demographic, social and political change raised issues about the continuing suitability of existing models. Two other thinkers stand out: the great liberal political philosopher John Stuart Mill and the poet, essayist and school inspector Matthew Arnold. Both agreed with Newman that a university education should be ‘an end in itself’ and devoted to the transmission of a general culture.

Matthew Arnold saw education at all levels as needing to combat the prevailing ‘mechanism’ and ‘Philistinism’  within contemporary nineteenth-century English society, in ways not dissimilar to the  concerns that many conservatives have about the dominance of economic considerations today.   Although a self-avowed liberal who would never have called himself a ‘conservative’ his priority was to provide for the education of a cultured clerisy which would set the tone for the rest of society and ensure  the transmission of ‘the best that has been thought and said’. Despite being quintessentially ‘conservative’ in his stress on an inherited culture  Arnold was also radical in his wish that the effect of such an education would enable us to make ‘a stream of fresh thoughts play freely about our stock notions and habits’, highlighting that conservatives can be, and often are, reformers but not reactionaries. [3]  

J S Mill, political philosopher and arch-priest of liberalism, would have abhorred any association with ‘conservatism’. As his arch-critic the Cambridge academic  Maurice Cowling put it, Mill’s liberalism is ‘not an invitation to every sort of human experiment but a means to the questioning of every established habit and received orthodoxy’. [4]  Despite this Mill gave an inaugural address  as Rector of the University of St Andrew’s in Scotland in 1867, in which his views about universities were in many ways deeply conservative. It is an inspiring address to students telling them what they ought to get out of their  university education, and a set of messages which the current author very much wished he had received when at university himself.

Mill’s plan for a university education has the Latin and Greek classics at its heart, together with a strong emphasis on poetry and the Fine Arts and on the lessons to be drawn from history, but also involves an introduction to all other major areas of study . Some specialisation would be permitted but the main aim of the university was to give ‘a comprehensive and connected view of the things that (the student) has learned separately’. [5] Although Cowling feels, with some reason, that Mill saw the purpose of a university education as the moulding of a clerisy committed to imposing  a liberal ‘Religion of Humanity’ on the wider society there is little sign of it in this address. [6]

To what extent can ‘general culture’ survive in an age of mass culture and university expansion?  Ortega y Gasset, Jaspers, Oakeshott, Maskell and Robinson, and Leavis

Social and political change, increasing specialisation, the emergence of a new ‘mass society’ and, after the Second World War, an expanded role for the state in higher education  radically modified the environment within which universities functioned in the twentieth century. This partly explains, among conservative writers on university education, the shift away from Newman’s idea of a course of ‘universal knowledge’ that would turn boys into ‘gentlemen... (with) a cultivated intellect’. This aim had not been abandoned but would have to be achieved alongside other objectives. Philosophers José Ortega y Gasset in Spain, in Misión de la Universidad (1930), and Karl Jaspers in Germany, in Die Idee der Universität  (1923, re-written in 1946), had to accept that professional education and specialisation of other kinds was a major feature of  universities in their countries,  while doing their best to hold on to the role of the university as a place committed to the formation of a cultured elite grounded in an appreciation of the humanities. For Ortega what was crucial was a re-vamped course of cultura general which would be required of all students and involve an introduction to the major disciplines and the relationships between them.[7]             

By contrast in England the liberal conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, although fully committed to all academic subjects being taught as truth-seeking ends in themselves, was content for students to follow single subject traditional academic courses confident that through the methods of study inherent to those disciplines and the cultivation of the Aristotelian intellectual virtues associated with them students would leave university generally well-educated. [8] Similar views have been expressed more recently by Duke Maskell and Ian Robinson in their critique of the utilitarian  ‘New Idea of a University’ and demand for a much reduced university system focused on traditional disciplines.[9]

One of the most interesting responses to a feeling that the world was losing the notion of an educated man, as a result of rapid change, levelling down and specialisation, came from the Cambridge literary critic F R Leavis who, in the middle of the Second World War, came up with a proposal for  new Cambridge University courses that would help to re-establish that wholeness of vision that Newman, Arnold and Mill had been encouraging. [10] The university, Leavis felt, had abandoned its task of giving a sense of common function to that small group of educated men responsible for the onward transmission of civilisation. Specialisation was inevitable, he admitted, but what was also needed was the development of a kind of central intelligence that could bring specialisms into relation with each other. The way forward he explored involved degree courses that would enable people to add, alongside their specialism, an intensive study of a past century comparing it with the present day. Such courses would develop students’ perception, judgment, analytical skill, reading capacity and understanding of what is worthy and what is not in all aspects of life – in other words provide a truly humane education. It would not be obligatory but, chosen by enough students, might do something to lighten what he saw as the depressing reality of modern times.

Do conservative ‘Ideas of a University’ have a future?

The obstacles to promoting ideas like those of Leavis are huge: massive vested interests; egalitarian pressure to open higher education to 50% or more of the population; the dominant focus on the ‘new man’ needed by the global economy; academics with a relativistic mindset who promote ‘woke’ causes; and the surrounding ‘civilisation of spectacle’ that makes deep study feel alien to some students.  

More fundamentally, as the US philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn put it, the problem is that ‘schools and colleges are not something apart from the social order to which they belong. They are that order trying to prepare its youth for participation in its own activities. And a society can only teach the hopes, the knowledge, the values, the beliefs which it has’.[11] For change to happen it must therefore come both from governments  which now have more control over universities than they have ever had over the last 1000 years and – above all – from below in jurisdictions where universities have autonomy and private funding is available.  If Leavis managed to brush pessimism aside in the dark days of 1943 it cannot be impossible, with initiatives stimulated from both these two directions, to do the same in the 2020s.

Nicholas Tate

The article is a written version of the keynote lecture Dr. Nicholas Tate held in Budapest at the conference titled The 1000 years ideal and future of university.

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[1] Jean-Philippe Vincent, Qu’est-ce que le conservatisme ?  Histoire intellectuelle d’une idée politique (Les Belles Lettres, 2016), 92, 116 and passim; Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (Macmillan, 1980), 11.  

[2] John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (Gutenberg Ebook, 2008), 3, 137, 147, 153, 161.

[3] Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Smith, Elder & Co., 1869), 

[4] Maurice Cowling, Mill and Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 87.

[5] John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address delivered to the University of St Andrew’s (Longmans, 1867), 7-9, 22, 34, 38, 66, 86-7, Mill, Inaugural Address delivered to the University of St Andrew’s, 89. 

[6] Cowling, 18, 38.

[7] José Ortega y Gasset, Mission of the University (Routledge, 1992); Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University, (Beacon Press, 1959).

[8] Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Idea of a University’, in Timothy Fuller, The Voice of Liberal Learning (Yale University Press, 1989); Nicholas Tate, The Conservative Case for Education (Routledge, 2017), 130-1, 166-72.

[9] Duke Maskell and Ian Robinson, The New Idea of a University (Haven Books, 2001).

[10] F R Leavis, Education and the University (Chatto and Windus, 1943).

[11] Leavis, Education and the University, 15.