Job prospects, useful knowledge, and the ‘rip-off’ University: returning to John Henry Newman in our post-pandemic moment

ABSTRACT

This paper re-examines the tension between professional and liberal education by revisiting The Idea of the University (1852), the seminal mid-nineteenth century treatise of John Henry Newman. In returning to Newman’s classic text, we are interested in the significance of his lectures for a contemporary Higher Education increasingly under pressure to be ‘useful:’ on this understanding, ‘useful’ denotes an arguably limited and utilitarian sense where the university guarantees its students a well-paying job on graduation. In pressing on this distinction between ‘the useful’ and ‘the useless’ – a distinction that continues to plague discourse on the contemporary university – our paper focuses on the experiential and pedagogical aspects of education that find recurring emphasis in Newman’s classic work: aspects of place, of community, and of the teacher–student relationship.

KEYWORDS:

• John Henry Newman
• higher education
• liberal education
• post-pandemic university
• professional education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).