Defining Professionalism: Newman Then and Now

John Henry Newman, like many Canadian scholars in the 1960s, was trained in a well-established institution and commissioned to start a new one. Newman used his experience in shaping reform in Victorian Oxford to design the first Catholic university in Ireland while rethinking the university more generally and defending liberal knowledge against the incursions of mechanical knowledge and the radical secularism it encouraged. The resultant lectures known as The Idea of a University are still revered today for defending core humanist values against crass instrumentality. What is less appreciated is how Newman’s version of the academy was anxious and compromised. For extended evidence of this I refer you to his famous Fifth Discourse on “Knowledge Its Own End,” but my example here comes from a lecture incorporated later, following on a recognition of epic poetry as imbricated with and subordinated to national destiny, in a locus classicus of imperialist ideology (Aeneid 6) that requires from Newman a more explicit, inadvertently revealing gloss:

What an empire is in political history, such is a University in the sphere of philosophy and research. It is … the high protecting power of all knowledge and all science, of fact and principle, of inquiry and discovery, of experiment and speculation; it maps out the territory of the intellect, and sees that the boundaries of each province are religiously respected, and that there is neither encroachment nor surrender on any side. It acts as an umpire between truth and truth, and, in taking into account the nature and importance of each, assigns to all their due order of precedence. … It is deferential and loyal, according to their respective weight, to the claims of literature, of physical research, of history, of metaphysics, of theological science. It is impartial towards them all, and promotes each in its own place and for its own object.

(220)

Newman’s personified university with its own distinctive citizenry and guilds embraces a full-blown civilizing mission. Cognitive imperialism dictates the nineteenth-century university’s monopolistic mapping and managing of physical and mental borders. Within these borders, knowledge seekers, bearers, and producers will be attended to individually and collectively by the paternal university as a supreme but caring power. It is a hierarchy impartial because quasi-imperial accords each discipline or mode of inquiry the right to be “its own object,” but only within an hierarchically assigned place, and aligning that arrangement with the reach and longevity of “old Rome” as ancient empire and then Christianity’s world religion. Here in Ireland, the anteroom of British empire and scene of centuries of Protestant ascendancy, Newman’s globalizing Britishness is muted and displaced, but it still requires him to negotiate the professorial-professional nexus as follows:

In this point of view, its several professors are like the ministers of various political powers at one court or conference. They represent their respective sciences … and should dispute arise between those sciences, they are the persons to talk over and arrange it, without risk of extravagant pretensions on any side, of angry collision, or of popular commotion. A liberal philosophy becomes the habit of minds thus exercised; a breadth and spaciousness of thought, in which lines, seemingly parallel, may converge at leisure, and principles, recognized as incommensurable, may be safely antagonistic.

(ibid.)

The scholars that Newman had just likened to judges and priests are now named “professors,” a term that went to the heart of Oxbridge debates about teaching and “research” (Huber 1.xxviii–xxix: Francis Newman’s Preface; Engel 15, 28), about the Germanizing and secularizing of English universities (Bill 28), and about the reproduction of elites versus an opening up of universities beyond religious tests and clerical subscriptions, while women, as usual, waited their turn. Newman reasserts the authority of tradition by sustaining his analogy between universities and empires in the professor/minister simile. Just as Newman had substituted revelation for revolution a paragraph previously, so revolution’s increasingly feeble enemy, the reactionary Congress System, cannot be named either. Newman, who had been in the thick of academic politics in Oxford, reduces that turmoil to courtly or Episcopal play...