The Idea of a University

John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was a leading 19th-century figure in both the religious and academic worlds. He began his career as an Oxford scholar and a clergyman, influenced at first by the evangelical wing of the Anglican Church. At the time, the Anglican Church was divided between a low-church movement, which preferred less ritualism and fewer connections to the sort of theology held by the Roman Catholic Church, and a high-church movement, which wanted to see more changes in the opposite direction. Over time, Newman moved in a distinctly high-church direction. He became a prominent figure in the Oxford Movement, a group of influential high-church scholars, many associated with the University of Oxford. This was also called the Tractarian Movement, named after their program of publishing a series of tracts that set forth their views on theology and the relationship between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. Newman authored some of these tracts, culminating in his theologically inflammatory “Tract 90” in 1841, which argued that the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches were theologically reconcilable. After a significant Anglican backlash against this opinion, Newman decided that his views could find a home in only the Roman Catholic Church.

After his conversion to Catholicism, Newman took up the mantle of a Catholic priest and joined a community of Oratorians (members of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri) in Birmingham. There, he continued his academic work, writing and speaking on the topic of Protestant-Catholic relations in England. Anti-Catholic sentiment was running high at the time, and Newman became a controversial figure throughout Britain, but he was regarded as something of a hero among Catholics. In 1852, as the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland was just establishing a Catholic university, Newman was invited to Dublin to deliver a series of discourses, which became the material for Part 1 of The Idea of a University. He was asked to return in 1854 to serve as the university’s rector, a position he held until 1857. During his four years there, he wrote and delivered the remaining essays and lectures in The Idea of a University. His rectorship, however, was not without controversy, and some prominent Irish Catholics frowned upon his methods in running the university.

Newman returned to England, where he spent the remainder of his life. He continued to actively promote educational institutions for Catholics, but his main contribution to broader English life came with his 1862 Apologia Pro Vita Sua. This book was a spiritual autobiography outlining his reasons for converting to Catholicism, and it was well received and widely successful in changing English society’s perception of him. He achieved the high Roman Catholic rank of cardinal in 1879, just over a decade before his death. He was canonized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church in 2019.

His dual accomplishments in both religion and academics placed him in a unique position to write a book like The Idea of a University. He was one of the only living bridges between the Roman Catholic Church and the educational legacy of the Protestant universities of England, having worked as both a clergyman and scholar at Oxford University before his conversion. Thus, when there arose the opportunity to found a Catholic university in Ireland, Newman was a key asset for the Roman Catholic Church to give the new institution an air of academic respectability. In the end, the book that resulted—The Idea of a University—proved far more influential than his tenure as rector, and its union of classical educational theory with theological acumen remains practically unrivaled.