Tag Archives: Universities

Atque et vale

30 Friday Jul 2021

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Education, Faith

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When I started at St Mary’s University in Twickenham in September 2016 I more or less gave up this blog. It was clear to me that participating in the Catholic Culture wars, even inadvertently, was incompatible with my new responsibilities – and anyway, I had a chance to actually do something – that is to help make a Catholic University a strong presence in the Higher Education sector – rather than simply write about these things.

As I retire, after forty-three years in Higher Education, five of them at St Mary’s, it is time to take up the reins again, not to participate in any culture wars – as my more recent posts here should have made clear, I long ago tired of that, but rather to reflect on Christianity in the public square. But first, and here, some reflections as I say “hail and farewell”.

I entered the world of Higher Education, as it then was not generally called, in September 1979 as a lecturer in the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglian in Norwich. I was even more blessed than I thought at the time. I knew jobs were going to become scarce, but none of us had any idea they would become so scarce that by 1983 even Mrs Thatcher’s Government, not well-disposed to the sector, would pump some money into what were called “new blood” posts, just to stop the situation becoming impossible. So many of my contemporaries who have jobs, got them then. The Thatcher Government distrusted Universities. It distrusted our claims of professionalism and self-governance, seeing in them little more than self-interested excuses for doing what we wanted rather than what we should be doing. The problem with this was that the Government was not terribly sure what that was, a problem shared by successive administrations, whose interventions would, but for the profesisonalism and resilience of the Sector, have totally wrecked things.

As it is, what successive Governments have managed to do is to load the Sector with a regulatory system which the old USSR would have envied, where the question “quis cusodiet ipsos cusdodes?” (who guards the guardians themselves?) is answered by the creation of ever more guardians; if this was a deliberate job-creation scheme for graduates, it would almost be admirable. As it is, even the present Government (surely in an unhappy catalogue the worst in living memory?) has realised it needs to cut back on the number of guardians. But it still has no idea what Higher Education is for. It seems, if one is to believe its rhetoric (itself an interesting philosophical question, can one believe a word that the Prime Minister utters when he so obviously has no conception of the distiction between truth and whatever suits his purpose?), it would seem that it wants “value for money degrees” and “useful knowledge.” Mr Gradgrind is back; in truth her never went away.

And yet, how ignorant this view of Higher Education is, as the University from which I am retiring has shown. With an Employability rate in the 90% range, in a university which takes more than 60% of its students from backgrounds where no one in the family has been to university, no one could accuse St Mary’s of not caring about getting good career prospects for its students. My academic colleagues put in longer hours than anyone would pay them for before they believe in the real mission of the university; they know our real Mission.

It is that mission which brought me to St Mary’s and it is that mission which took me into Higher Education, and it is a mission with a heavy religious dimension. It is best expressed in St John Henry Newman’s words:

God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons

Newman

And that, in a nutshell, is what we do in Higher Education. Our job is simple but complex, it is to help every student who is capable of studying and wants to study, to become the best “them” they can be. It’s not our job to say how many scientists, lawyers etc. the country is going to need. No one can know that. Jobs which the Government might say are essential today, may not exist in twenty years time, and jobs no one ever thought of will exist. What is needed are people who know how to think and people who are rounded individuals. Newman got it right in his Idea of a University and it is that mission which St Mary’s has continued.

St Mary’s is a special place because embedded in its DNA is a commitment to teaching. It was founded in 1850 to provide teachers for “Catholic Poor Schools.” It was not founded by any Government, it was founded by the Catholic Church to help train teachers for the Irish immigrants and other Catholics in London. That great and much-understimated man, Cardinal Manning, would not allow the construction of a cathedral in London until every parish had a school. Education pulled men and women out of poverty – and poverty took, and takes many forms.

After the Pandemic, no one can doubt that communities in this country are still blighted by material poverty, and the Churches, Anglican and Catholic, have played a noble part in helping alleviate the suffering it causes. But there is spiritual poverty, there is cultural poverty, there is the poverty of a life lived simply for work, where the riches of family and friends take second-place to the “toad work” as Larkin put it:

Why should I let the toad work

Squat on my life?

Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork

And drive the brute off?

Philip Larkin: Toads

One of the purposes of a University education is to help each invidual find that destiny for which God has selected them, and to equip them with the wherewithal to achieve it. But that destiny has never been just to get rich. We can see what God thinks of such people not only by those to whom he gives riches, but by what he has to say about them in Scripture. Life is a gift, and teaching at any level is a privilege because we get the chance to help others become what is in them – education is about that “leading out” process.

It ws with this faith that I entered Higher Education forty-three years ago and as I retire from my Provostship I can say as St Paul did

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

I now hand on that torch, with confidence, to my successors. There is a very great deal of rubbish talked about what goes on in our universities most of it from people who are not in them. For sure, as we are fallen creatures, not all is Eden, but I thought, as I looked out with pride at my last graduation ceremony as Provost, that of all the ways of spending the life given to me by God, this was one of the better ones. My teachers made a difference to me they could never have imagined, and if by God’s Grace I have been able to do likewise, that is sufficient.

Education, what is it good for?

19 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by in Church/State, Education, Faith

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One characteristic of modern, advanced countries, is that they realise that education is essential. We forget how recently this, now commonplace statement, was not the case. In the UK it was not until 1870 that there was primary and secondary schooling for all, and as late as the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries, there were only half a dozen universities in the UK, and most of them dated from the Middle Ages. It was not until 1944 that the UK Government really turned its attention to secondary education. Before then, the main provider of education was the Church.

The Church, of course had a vested interest in the subject, and as, until relatively recent times, it provided the State with many of those who ran its institutions, the State was willing to support its efforts. For all the ill-informed criticisms directed at the medieval Church, there can be no doubt that it was, in effect, the Noah’s ark of classical learning.

By the mid-twentieth century, it was accepted that modern States needed a highly educated work-force. In the UK, with its clear hierarchy of class, that tended to mean that anything utilitarian, was under-valued. When the British State expanded Higher Education in the 1960s, it did so by establishing universities which, despite the hyperbole about them being ‘new’, tended to imitate the established universities. It was left to the Polytechnics to deal with the more utilitarian end of the education market, but even there, the British class system exerted its pull, and as they expanded, many of them looked to imitate the traditional providers of Higher Education.

As usual in the UK, there was much pragmatism but little discussion of first principles. The Blessed John Henry Newman had clear ideas about what a university should be for. It should be a community of scholars, and the older ones should prepare the younger ones to be people able to realise the gifts they had been given by God. His faith in Divine Providence convinced him, in a religious version of market economics, that if Universities did that, then men (and in his day women were barred from Higher Education) would find the place where they could fulfil their destiny. He understood, as all good educators do, that it was the whole person, and not just the intellect, which needed to be brought out (‘e duco’ – leading out, the Latin root of the word).

That is why education, cut off from its religious roots, is in perpetual danger. The State is always myopic. Politicians, wedded to short-termism (usually the date of the next election) will seek to make it fulfil whatever short-term need they can think of. But they need, as the Church has always done, to take account of the sort of society they want to live in. Music and the arts do not happen by accident, and a good society will want them and value them; it will also be willing to pay for them, and allow rich men and women to support them too.

Education is for life, not just for a few years in our youth. If we grasp that it is about helping each of us be the person God meant us to be, then we are at less risk from the fads and fallacies of the age.

Catholic higher education (1)

25 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Education, Faith

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What does it mean to be a Catholic University in the public square? By that, I mean a University which is part of a national system which is filled, very largely, with secular universities, and which has many students, and staff, who are not Catholics? It would be easy to answer that in these circumstances it either is not Catholic, or, that in order to become so, it must become exclusively Catholic. Setting aside, for a moment, the question as to whether the Catholic equivalent of a Madrassa is desirable, one might well conclude it is not viable; are there enough Catholic students who want to come to a Catholic University, and are there enough staff? And what, in the meantime, would one do with those staff and students who are not Catholic? Then there is the little question of what ‘Catholic’ might mean in a world where some Catholics doubt that the Pope is a Catholic (but still maintain their faith in what bears do in the woods)? Easiest, perhaps, to retreat into vague talk about a ‘Catholic ethos’; but that does not provide us with much of a refuge.

St John Paul II – a man whose life was much enriched by a Catholic higher education – gave us his thoughts on this in Ex Corde Ecclesiae back in 1990. There he wrote, inter alia that:

‘It is the honour and responsibility of a Catholic University to consecrate itself without reserve to the cause of truth. This is its way of serving at one and the same time both the dignity of man and the good of the Church, which has “an intimate conviction that truth is (its) real ally … and that knowledge and reason are sure ministers to faith”(7). Without in any way neglecting the acquisition of useful knowledge, a Catholic University is distinguished by its free search for the whole truth about nature, man and God.’ A Catholic education is not only preparation for a career, but preparation for the rest of your life; but what does a “Catholic education” mean in the West in the twenty-first century?

In a society which has moved ever further away from the idea that there is any such thing as ‘truth’, that makes a Catholic University an interesting phenomenon. It cannot fail to engage with the modern relativism, but it begins with something that the modern relativist lacks – a scepticism about such claims. As St John Paul recognised: truth is a ‘fundamental value without which freedom, justice and human dignity are extinguished’. As we have seen when looking at the ‘option for infanticide’, it is not easy to construct a non-Christian argument for why that option should not be taken. Scoence and technology have immeasurably enriched our lives, but provide, in themselves, no moral frameworks: the job of Catholic higher education is to do just that – to suggest, nay more, to explore and assert those values which follow from our religion. Our job, he suggest is to assist ‘in the protection and advancement of human dignity and of a cultural heritage through research, teaching and various services offered to the local, national and international communities’. That means that:

“In a Catholic University, therefore, Catholic ideals, attitudes and principles penetrate and inform university activities in accordance with the proper nature and autonomy of these activities. In a word, being both a University and Catholic, it must be both a community of scholars representing various branches of human knowledge, and an academic institution in which Catholicism is vitally present and operative”

 

We cannot, and indeed should not, shy away from the debate between faith and reason, for the Truth has nothing to fear from such a debate. But for us, ethical and moral considerations underpin everything – from our research, through our teaching, right into the conditions of employment for our staff. In an era where it is increasingly common for universities to farm out non-academic related services to ‘service providers’, Catholic universities should resist that. We should pay our staff properly (in the UK the ‘living wage’) and recognise them as a critical part of our community. That has to be at the heart of our Catholic higher education – a spirit of community, where everyone, Catholic and non-Catholic, (all) staff and students, feel a sense of being part of a common endeavour. As St John Paul recognised, this brings its own rewards if you get it right:

“The source of its unity springs from a common dedication to the truth, a common vision of the dignity of the human person and, ultimately, the person and message of Christ which gives the Institution its distinctive character. As a result of this inspiration, the community is animated by a spirit of freedom and charity; it is characterized by mutual respect, sincere dialogue, and protection of the rights of individuals. It assists each of its members to achieve wholeness as human persons; in turn, everyone in the community helps in promoting unity, and each one, according to his or her role and capacity, contributes towards decisions which affect the community, and also towards maintaining and strengthening the distinctive Catholic character of the Institution.”

That all sounds excellent. But that was 1990 – and is anyone bold enough to make the claim nearly 30 years on that we have achieved that? The USCCB produced a 25 year report which is is rich in comments about ‘dialogue’ and ‘cooperation’, but somewhat lacking in specifics. And that, of course, is in the US – so may not offer much to the UK – except an example of how opaque prose discourages serious questions. America has many ‘Catholic Schools’ and the USCCB at least has some views on these things – whatever may be the criticisms of it. Here, we have made a start, of sorts, with the ‘Cathedrals Group’ of Universities whose members ‘share a common faith heritage and a strong commitment to values such as social justice, respect for the individual and promoting the public good through their work with communities and charities.’ That’s good to know, but does not take us further into the question of what a Catholic University in the UK might look like.

 

Success?

18 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by in Education

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The sort of photograph newspapers are not supposed to publish any more in case it upsets people.

Today is the day on which students in England and Wales get their A level results, and on that depends the fate of any of them wanting to go on into higher or further education. Social media is full of reassuring messages for those judged to have ‘failed’. One which moved me greatly was from a former student of mine who is now a Professor of History, and who came to us with what he calls ‘crap A levels’. But in those days (the late 1980s) we could take him with those grades; we could not now. Why the difference? Back then higher education was not a ‘market’ and with numbers of applicants fewer than they are now, we were allowed to exercise our professional judgement. Mine was that he had the attitude of mind and the determination to succeed, and his A level results in no way measured his real potential; something had gone wrong at exam time, but I was confident that could be put right. A BA and a PhD later, he showed the wisdom of that attitude. He was not the only one, but I admired his determination then, and I admire his sharing his poor A level performance with others – may it encourage them.

Sometimes exams don’t work in the way they are meant to. Sometimes we don’t work at them in the way we are meant to (after all between 16 and 18 many people discover other interests in life). It is easy when the results don’t go the way you wanted to bemoan your fate. In an era where league tables of Universities seem to have taken on a life of their own, it is even easier to be despondent because you cannot get into the place you wanted and you have to settle for less. That is one way of thinking about it; but it is the wrong one. The UK in fortunate in having lots of good universities, and that can mean that if you take a bit of time, you can still find one which suits you and in which you will do well. League tables tell you something, but not everything. They tell undergraduates very little about the quality of the teaching they will receive for their £9k fees – which is why the Government is driving forward with plans for a ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’. Of course such exercises cannot measure what they claim, but that is true of the Research Excellence Framework, and we have lived with that for much of my academic career. If we are to have league tables (and like the poor they are always with us) let us at least have ones with proxies for teaching excellence.

We hear much about so-called ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees, presumably from those with PhDs in quantum mechanics. Most degrees are not vocational in a direct sense. No one, after all, knows how many engineers, chemists, accountants and lawyers the economy will need, and most past attempts to second-guess it have failed, Newman thought what was needed were people who knew how to think critically and who were able to adapt themselves to the demands of any career – vocational training could be provided on the spot. I have spent my life either teaching bright young minds, or helping run places which do that. It is not, someone said to me the day ‘much of a career’. I agreed. It isn’t, it is a vocation. Universities began as places where the Church and the State could acquire bright young men to help run them, but they soon acquired what all good universities have, which is a love of learning for its own sake, and a desire to work with young minds to help them achieve their best. For all the many changes, such an ethos still lies at the heart of our universities, and those young (and now, thank goodness some not so young) people who go there will embark on an adventure in learning which will help equip them with the critical thinking skills needed to be be of service to themselves and society in the fast-changing world into which they will graduate.

I wish them all well.