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

Introduction

They’re talking about their college applications. Marianne is lying with the bedsheet pulled carelessly over her body, and Connell’s sitting up with her Macbook in his lap. She’s already applied for History and Politics in Trinity. He’s put down Law in Galway, but now he thinks he might change it, because, as Marianne has pointed out, he has no interest in Law. […]

You should study English, says Marianne. It’s the only subject you truly enjoy in school. And you spend all your free time reading. […]

Yeah I’m not sure about the job prospects though.

Oh, who cares? The economy’s fucked anyway.

Sally Rooney, Normal People (Rooney 2018)

Liberal education and market economics have always enjoyed a fraught relationship. There is a direct and meaningful connection between a young person’s first steps towards (financially) independent adult existence and their formative years within post-secondary education. But what is this connection, exactly? How has it changed from the advent of the modern university to the experience of higher education in our present time? And does any individual have the power to reject or re-formulate it?

As illustrated in Rooney’s Normal People, this connection between the educational and the economical has become increasingly strained in our contemporary moment when higher education is no longer a guarantor of upward social mobility. For Rooney’s central characters, Connell’s clear love for English is not enough to assuage his working-class fears about ‘job prospects’ until Marianne, buoyed by her class positioning and generational wealth, tells him: ‘who cares? The economy’s fucked anyway’ (Rooney 2018, 21). Coming of age during the post-2008 global recession, it is unlikely that Connell will get a job whether he studies law or not, and so his character diverges from a traditionally professional to a characteristically liberal pathway. He moves from Sligo to Dublin to study English at Trinity College. In so doing, Connell places an optimistic stake not only in his relationship with Marianne but in the possible futures that only an Arts and Humanities degree might open up. As Darling argues, however, Connell’s university experience is not straightforwardly positive; rather, ‘Trinity College and Dublin are, for Connell, sites of neoliberal violence: his personal insecurities are exacerbated by his socio-economic background, leading to his alienation from himself and to his depressive episodes’ (Darling 2023, 21). Connell’s class positioning is not so easily sloughed off, then, no matter the promises of a prestigious third-level education.

In this paper, we re-examine this tension between professional and liberal education by revisiting in detail The Idea of the University, the seminal mid-nineteenth century treatise of John Henry Newman. It is a core tenet of Idea that the university should concern itself not with instruction but with education. ‘We are instructed,’ writes Newman, ‘in manual exercises, in the fine and useful arts, in trades, and in way of business; for these are methods, which have little or no effect upon the mind itself, are contained in rules committed to memory, to tradition, or to use, and bear upon an end external to themselves. But education is a higher word; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character’ […] (Newman 1996, 114). The university, in other words, must remain a protected space for liberal rather than useful knowledge; lectures and seminars must be valued not for the training of professional workers but for the intellectual formation of individual selves; and higher education, in sum, must be understood not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. It is this core philosophical idea that animates much of Newman’s classic writings and is one of the primary reasons for its canonical status among scholarship of the modern university (Pelikan 1992).

Newman’s Idea began as a series of live lectures addressed in 1852 to the ecclesiastical élite of Catholic Ireland. The text of these lectures, along with unpublished lectures and occasional writings prepared by Newman as Rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, formed the basis of the two books of the Idea which subsequently became a foundational text not only for University College Dublin – the institutional successor to Newman’s Catholic University – but for university education in the liberal tradition. In returning to this body of work a century and a half after its publication, we are interested in the power and relevance of Newman’s writing to the so-called ‘post-pandemic’ or ‘post-coronial’ university – when the question of ‘useful’ versus ‘useless’ knowledge has garnered a new urgency. In bringing this urgency to light, we focus in our paper on the experiential and pedagogical aspects of education that find recurring emphasis in Newman’s work: aspects of place, of community, and of the teacher–student relationship. In our view, it is these experiential aspects that merit particular re-examination from the vantage point of the university in 2024.

Over and over again since the early nineteenth century, critics, reformers, and governments have claimed that the studies carried on in universities are outdated, irrelevant, or, in a word, useless, and that they need to be made to serve national needs more effectively and more directly – to become, in other words, more useful (Collini 2012, 39). In other words, this debate in higher education between the ‘useful’ and the ‘useless’ is a depressingly repetitive one, as pointed out by Stefan Collini in his seminal What Are Universities For?, itself published over a decade ago. No doubt Collini would be even more depressed to read the most recent iterations of this discourse: Marco Rubio’s statement at the Republican presidential debate in 2015 that philosophy majors ‘would be better off going into welding’ (Rappeport 2015), not to mention Rishi Sunak’s controversial call in 2023 that the UK government ‘crack down’ on ‘rip-off’ university degrees (Davies 2023).

In fully acknowledging the depressing circularity of these debates, we nonetheless maintain their importance in our contemporary moment when education finds itself in combat with an increasingly technicized and dehumanized public discourse marred by an unregulated social media and the seemingly unstoppable rise of AI. Newman’s lectures are happily innocent of these contemporary crises. And yet, this nineteenth-century body of work is still importantly prophetic of our financially driven social and political paradigm (Dunne 2006), and the consequent necessity to defend the life of the mind against an instrumentalism and managerialism progressively taking hold in public life.

Section I: the placeful university

John Henry Newman was an Anglican (Church of England) priest before controversially converting to Roman Catholicism in 1845. In 1854, Newman was invited by the Irish episcopate to establish a Catholic University in Dublin; this was to be developed in the same city as the Protestant university of Trinity College, itself established by royal charter of Queen Elizabeth in 1592 and modelled after the collegiate universities of Oxford and Cambridge. There is an overarching religious and specifically Catholic dimension to Newman’s lectures, then, which outline his desire for a university that had both intellectual and spiritual development at its core. Newman himself was canonized as a saint in 2019 by the Roman Catholic Church.

For Newman, the value of a liberal education goes well beyond the development of any particular skill-set or technical mastery necessary for entry into a professional field. What matters to a much greater extent is the undergraduate’s experience of university while they are there – who they converse with, where these conversations happen, and how they are brought into the university community through challenging and mind-expanding dialogue. This is the education, writes Newman, which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit and to master any subject with facility (Newman 1996, 110).

It is the development of the whole person, then, that finds emphasis throughout Newman’s work. And in this emphasis on experience over expertise, he is particularly committed to the importance of place. The university for Newman is a sort of ‘home away from home’ (Mulcahy 2008, 224) where the residential aspects of living with fellow students and scholars are just as important as any classroom experience. Here, the experience of actually living within the university’s walls is fundamental to the educational mission of nurturing the ongoing development of students. The university residence becomes the bedrock of a student’s ‘education in freedom’ where their living quarters and surrounding environs provide not just practical necessities but intellectual resources whereby a genuine community of scholars can walk together, dine together, and commune. We are reminded here of Edward Said’s notion of the university as a place of togetherness and collaboration where, in his idealistic sense, ‘[t]o join the academic world is therefore to enter a ceaseless quest for knowledge and freedom’ (Said 1996, 228).

Certainly for Newman, the profound personal and intellectual impact of tutors and colleagues living and working together – in concert with the traditional pedagogical forms of the university – provides the firmest of foundations from which individuals can grow and develop not just academically but as fully rounded individuals. Such community is insulated in very important senses from the commercial cares of the world outside. As Carrigan captures this point, there is little doubt that Newman was profoundly influenced by his time in Oxford; a collegiate university whose medieval architecture, enclosed cloisters, and manicured gardens contrast sharply with the sound of Oxford’s busy city traffic and bevies of curious tourists taking ‘selfies’ at the various college entrances (Carrigan, 2023, p. 2). At the core of Newman’s thought is this idea of the university as a protected place of concourse and co-operation where students and teachers fully flourish in supportive and collegial environs.

From a philosophical perspective, place as an increasingly pressing dimension of our university lives is discussed compellingly by Danish academics, Nørgård and Bengtsen. In their 2016 paper, ‘Academic citizenship beyond the campus: A Call for the Placeful University,’ they argue for the university as a ‘place that cares.’ The university on their ‘placeful’ model should invite belonging and inclusion, and it should be particularly open to embodied practices of dwelling. It should invite people to rest and not merely to pass through. In the authors’ own words:

When we speak of the university as a place and not merely a space, we speak of it as a place where people, with Heidegger’s term, ‘dwell’. It is not an empty container to be filled with the conceptual spirit or concrete flesh of the people occupying these spaces. The university itself is a force of being, and by dwelling there we become ‘absorbed’ into this being. Accordingly, the university is not just a space we occupy in a specific time span during the day, while we teach or attend classes, continue our research projects, and maintain and develop the infrastructure of our department or faculty. Rather, the university becomes part of our broader lifeworld. (Nørgård and Bengtsen 2016, 9)

Given the rise of online learning and the virtual university, it is interesting to consider how the richness of place and experience afforded by Newman’s residential model and underscored by the more recent scholarship by Nørgård and Bengtsen compares to Higher Education as it is experienced in our post-pandemic moment. While Horton makes the point that the virtual campus can still be a place of ‘concourse’ in Newman’s terms, and that it is in fact accessible to a much greater diversity of students than the residential undergraduate college (Horton 2012, 49), Newman still prompts us to consider what we lose in experiential terms when we interact virtually rather than in-person. Certainly, such loss is felt especially keenly by younger students whose life experiences prior to university have been somewhat circumscribed or limited. But it is also felt by university faculty for whom the social aspect of learning has always been paramount. In the words of one UK faculty member, on contemplating the return to the physical campus post-Covid:

I want to be back in the classroom. I miss the serendipity of snatched conversations in the interstices of lectures and seminars. I miss people-watching – seeing new students literally and metaphorically navigate campus. I even miss the abysmal coffee in mandatory meetings. I want those rectangles to burst open into the messy, complicated, exciting physical spaces we used to inhabit. (Rees et al. 2021, no page)

It is interesting to pause and to pay attention here to the metaphorical dimensions of this statement. Rees writes of ‘snatched conversations,’ of pedagogical ‘interstices,’ and of those many ‘messy and complicated’ spaces that were deeply missed throughout lockdown. These metaphors all connote a fugitive and yet fundamentally important aspect of the placeful campus – the sense, perhaps, that our most important moments with each other are those of the in-between, those interactions that we steal back from the more formally sanctioned or time-bound strictures of the university. Such interactions are never spoken of in terms of professional mastery or a technical acumen that one might reasonably accrue during Higher Learning at the undergraduate or postgraduate level. They are unlikely to find formal expression in any official list of module or programme outcomes. And yet, we would maintain that these unofficial or fugitive or stolen moments are nonetheless crucial in appreciating our shared humanity – in cultivating what Newman would certainly recognise as the liberal dimension of our lives together.

The ‘placeful campus’ has of course taken on a new meaning following the COVID-19 pandemic, and the mass closure of university buildings in 2020 and 2021. A key legacy of the post-pandemic university is the co-existence of the physical campus with hybrid time-spaces of learning and interaction. It is interesting to consider how these still-developing spaces fit with Newman’s ideals of place and the humane. Certain commentators point to the opportunities, post-pandemic, for greater inclusion and wider participation of disadvantaged groups. In the recent work of Tzirides, Montebello, Cope, and Kalantzis, for example, mass online learning is praised for its potential to develop new pedagogies ‘of intense engagement,’ ‘lifewide and lifelong learning,’ and ‘social knowledge and collaborative intelligence’ (Tzirides et al. 2023, 105). Opposing critics suggest that the pandemic has done little for social access and inclusion beyond exacerbating already existing inequalities within the university sector. On this reading, the pandemic has exposed the collective selfishness belying fashionable higher education discourses of equity and inclusion; it has emphasized commercial logic rather than human concern; and it has ‘made plain the ravages of neoliberalism in higher education,’ in the words of Thomas and Whitburn (2023, 170).

It is clear that the pandemic has offered universities a compelling pretext for change, such polarized critical perspectives aside, and that a new set of institutional and cultural values needs now to be developed. Any university campus – physical or virtual – must consider which type of student might be advantaged (or disadvantaged) in the post-pandemic vision. Certainly, we might look to classic texts such as Newman’s in developing this new ethic of the university. But if we do, we must proceed with a clear-eyed view of the many inequalities (along gendered as well as socio-economic lines) that attend his nineteenth-century ideals (Harford 2008).

Section 2: the relational campus

Fundamental to Newman’s theory of a liberal education is its residential or placeful aspects. But equally important are those human relationships that co-constitute the campus experience, the most important relationship of all being that between student and teacher. For Newman, the presence of the teacher is ‘paramount’ to the personal, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development of any undergraduate (Mulcahy 2008, 223). In his own terms: ‘It is the living voice, the breathing form, the expressive countenance which preaches, which catechises. Truth, a subtle, invisible, manifold spirit, is poured in the mind of the scholar by his eyes and ears, through his affections, imagination, and reason’ (Newman 1961, 14).

The teacher functions, then, as a crucial intermediary between any body of knowledge and any person seeking to master it; as Mulcahy parses this intermediary role, ‘it is to the teacher’s accent and intonation, manner and gestures, genius, and virtue that Newman looks for the source of influence’ (Mulcahy 2008, 223). The student must be with the teacher for true education to occur, and such education goes far beyond the mastery of mere curricular content. ‘A University is, according to the usual designation, an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill’ (Newman 1996, 146).

For Newman, at the heart of any relational campus is the tutorial system, established in the 1800s at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The tutorial system foregrounds regular discussion sessions in small-group settings. These discussion sessions are in turn responsible for moral as well as intellectual development, for ‘the principal making of men’ (Shrimpton 2014) as highlighted by Shrimpton. Newman’s view is that the ‘real working men’ in universities are tutors and not professors; it is the former that serve a crucial role as ‘moral and religious guardians’ of their students (Shrimpton 2023, 161). The lecture system by its very nature is pedagogically inadequate because of the passive and listening nature of student engagement which does not truly allow for the development of character. The tutorial system, by contrast, facilitates the ‘catechetical form of instruction and the closeness of work in a small class’ (163), experiences in which tutors become ‘half companions, half advisers of their pupils’ (164).

A major contribution of the tutorial system as it developed at Oxford and Cambridge was that it created learning and assessment opportunities that were highly authentic and difficult to fake. During a tutorial, a student was expected to orally communicate, defend, analyse, and critique the ideas of others as well as their own in conversations with the tutor and fellow students. The underlying aim was to foster dialogue, argumentation, and independent thought and to prioritize one-on-one interactive engagement between the student as learner and the tutor as teaching scholar (Trigwell and Ashwin 2003). Moreover, while lectures, classroom presentations, and open fora for discussion between students and faculty were never absent, the view on the tutorial was that it was central to ensuring a student was prevented from ‘following false and valueless trails’ (Palfreyman 2008, 21). The approach appealed to university authorities, too, because of its relative simplicity and its administrative practicality. The emphasis that Newman placed on the tutorial system was even greater than it was at Oxford and Cambridge at the time. Indeed, opposition by the Provost of Oriel College to Newman’s commitment to a more direct and personal teaching relationship with undergraduates was a major contributor to Newman’s eventual departure from Oxford and his move to Dublin (Shrimpton 2023). Newman believed wholeheartedly in the potential of the tutorial system to foster teacher–student relationships that were singularly authentic, educational, and edifying.

Recent scholarship at the confluence of Philosophy of Education and Higher Education Studies has followed Newman, interestingly, in its development of a richer accounting for the teacher–student relationship. We turn here specifically to the work of Fulford and Locke (2023) which reimagines the relational in Higher Education in vital and illuminating ways. These authors draw on the work of French existentialist philosopher and playwright, Gabriel Marcel – specifically, Marcel’s concepts ‘of availability, communion, presence, and plenitude’ – to explore what it means to authentically relate to each other as a community of teachers and students. Fulford and Locke probe Marcel’s notion of ‘availability,’ in particular, to survey how the contemporary academic might genuinely open themselves up (or not, as the case may be) to their student or supervisee. ‘To be available is not a temporal issue,’ they write, ‘– of making time in one’s schedule to, say, see students who call by the office. It is rather understood in a richer sense: as a general state of, and commitment to, making one’s material, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual resources available to others that is marked by love, hope, and fidelity’ (Fulford and Locke 2023, 57). Advocating for ‘love, hope, and fidelity’ might seem strange to those of us immersed in discourses of the neoliberal university. And yet, there is a refreshing vulnerability to this suggestion that returns us in very meaningful ways to education understood not as a profession but as a vocation – as a calling, that began for many of us with a genuine desire to guide and mentor young people. There are direct and important connections here with Newman’s philosophy of the teacher and student, particularly when we look again to his emphasis on the tutorial as pedagogical form. For Newman, learning in the tutorial context is the result of an individual’s views shifting and evolving in response to debate and argumentation between teacher and student; at the heart of this relationship is gratitude, trust and the ‘intercourse of mind with mind’ (Shrimpton 2023, 165).

Undoubtedly, there are practical challenges in adopting Newmans’ ideals to the specific context of the contemporary university – and there are particular challenges in applying his tutorial model to mass Higher Education institutions. As Macfarlane has pointed out, given the massification of its numbers, the contemporary university resembles less a country house hotel and more a budget hostel (Macfarlane 2017); the capacity, then, for every teaching academic to have an edifying personal relationship with their individual students is consequently under strain. Still, in highlighting Newman’s pedagogical ideals, we would yet hope to sensitise contemporary university lecturers and tutors to the importance of the teacher–student relationship and the agency they still have in developing it. We do not wish to put forward here a toolkit or set of instructions but rather to encourage ourselves and our teaching peers to be more responsive, more approachable, more human, in how we relate.

Take the example of the postgraduate student who has submitted a draft dissertation chapter for our consideration. The student is diligent and intelligent and has identified a promising area for their research; unfortunately, however, their academic writing is poor. There is a hesitancy in how they present their arguments and a seeming reluctance to engage directly with the relevant body of critical scholarship. What is important here, we would suggest – and here we take guidance from Newman’s pedagogic model which foregrounds, again, ‘the intercourse of mind with mind’ – is our willingness to genuinely understand where this student is coming from and what type of feedback, perhaps, they have received in their academic journey to date. How might we sensitively explore issues of personal and academic confidence and so make space for the conversation that this student really needs? Arguably, such conversation is more important to this student than any emphasis on technicalities or practicalities (or, indeed, any quick-fix solutions along the lines of ‘you should really make an appointment with the Writing Centre’). As Locke has argued, in his related discussion of the doctoral student/supervisor relationship, the commitment one should make here is to the person rather than the process. Such commitment ‘is not to the practicalities of meetings, or the carrying out of functions, but rather a commitment to authentically understanding the other in their actions and aims’ (Locke 2024, 151). We would argue that such authentic understanding is present at the very heart of Newman’s pedagogic model.

Section 3: education and the practice of freedom

[…] The essence of a liberal arts education is the ability to be flexible and curious, to be able to teach Othello and then write for Bridal Guide, to publish several novels and open a bookstore, to promote the work of living writers, to evolve. […] the future is not one thing. So many possibilities can arise as a result of intelligence, education, curiosity, and hard work. No one ever told me that, and I’m sorry it took this long for me to figure it out.- Ann Patchett, These Precious Days (Patchett 2021)

We have been arguing throughout this paper that it is Newman’s emphasis on the experiential aspects of university life – on place, on relationships, on community – that are particularly important for a richer understanding of liberal education as he conceived of it. This is an education that is dialogical, corporeal, and above all human. It is an education that valourises process rather than product and that holds open a core commitment to the young person as they develop in character and judgment. This focus on intrinsic good over extrinsic reward returns us to the distinctions with which we framed this paper at its outset: those between the professional and the liberal or, in Collini’s deliberately provocative terms, between the useful and the useless.

The liberal arts tradition has always held ideals of freedom and emancipation at its core, based on an understanding that education in its perfect sense equips the young person ‘to make their own free, autonomous choices about the life they will lead’ (Bridges 1992, 92). This recognition of education’s emancipatory potential – which allows a freeing of the mind for teacher as well as student – is expanded on in interesting terms by contemporary American philosopher, Richard Rorty. For Rorty, a ‘higher’ education is distinguished by its fostering of a usefully sceptical and critical attitude and by the transformation of the socialised into the individualised self (Rorty 1999). This is an ideal of the university very much in line with the classic Aristotelian model where liberal education foments leisurely, contemplative, and non-instrumentalist pursuits. Indeed, Rorty suggests that education covers two entirely distinct processes, namely, ‘socialisation’ and ‘individualisation.’ In the first of these stages, students unquestionably absorb the moral and political norms of their societies. On arriving at university, this unquestioning stance is radically challenged as students develop a distinct scepticism regarding all they have imbibed to date. In Rorty’s terms, the very point of a higher education is the development of this scepticism, not to encourage a wearisome hypercriticality or unhelpful fault-finding but ‘to help students realize that they can reshape themselves – that they can rework the self-image foisted on them by their past, the self-image that makes them competent citizens, into a new self-image that they themselves have helped to create’ (Rorty 1999, 125). This, then, is education’s particular creative ability – the significant potential it holds to reshape, to liberate, and to emancipate.

Rorty’s educational ideal is anticipated in interesting ways in the work of political theorist, Michael Oakeshott, who has similarly argued for the unique promise of a liberal education. For Oakeshott, specifically, the university can offer to its youthful denizens ‘the gift of the interval’ (Oakeshott 1989, 10), a time and place of refuge where thinkers can test and share their tentative ideas without fear of repercussions from the outside world. Such an interval is a crucial component for intellectual as well as moral formation. In a similar vein, it is argued by Jon Nixon that the university is a place for students to lose their way in order to come back as different persons; the university in this sense is imagined as ‘a privileged space in which to venture out, to test the water’ (Nixon 2018, 88). Thus, for both Oakeshott and Nixon, university students can reimagine or ‘reshape’ themselves (to use Rorty’s phrase once more) in ways that are singularly formative and emancipatory.

Newman’s model of liberal education is one rooted in Christian-humanist values and, as such, emphasizes community over individualism. It is therefore an interesting counterpoint to more contemporary secular perspectives (such as those advocated for by Oakeshott, Bridges, or Rorty) that stress the individual self and how it might be ‘reshaped’ through transformative educational processes. Still, central to both of these liberal models is the non-instrumentalist idea of education as a good in itself and, as such, as a good worth preserving above and beyond professional or commercial concerns. In the Irish context, we are lucky to have contemporary thought leaders who still advocate for the value of a liberal education along these non-instrumentalist lines. President Michael D. Higgins, for one, has spoken in interview of education as the ultimate source of freedom and agency, where we are liberated into the possibilities of our shared humanity. Higgins shares with Newman the idea that liberal education should not principally be about preparing us to enter society. Rather, liberal education ‘should focus on preparing us for the times we fall out of society. It should be based on an appreciation that it is only in response to such falls that we may each form a valued individuality’ (Arcilla 2012, 166), as philosopher of education René Arcilla beautifully captures this point. Rather than seeing work, then, as the exclusive reference point for our lives (Gary 2017), we need to remember Oakeshott’s point that we are distinguished as humans by our capacity to enjoy freedom and leisure – by our capacity ‘to pursue questions, conversations, and explorations that transcend the realm of production and consumption’ (Gary 2017, 83).

Conclusion

She wasn’t even fully sure how she ended up in the college, which was separated from the outside world by large and forbidding gates, an oasis in an uncaring city. She remembered reading through the college brochures and picking the place with the oldest, leafiest trees, the highest buildings. This was where she would get most value for money, she decided.Nicole Flattery, Show Them A Good Time (Flattery 2019)

It is a truism at this point to state that the contemporary university has developed within a neoliberal discourse that has characteristically foregrounded the useful – that the university in 2024 must sell itself to students as a source of advanced career possibilities and to governments as a pipeline for suitably skilled graduates to power the knowledge economy. As illustrated in the sardonic commentary of Nicole Flattery’s character above, however, students themselves are hyper-aware of this commercial logic and only too cynical about its realities. If higher education is something to be marketed and sold (at the very least, through alluring university websites and attractive ‘college brochures’), then the student is positioned as canny consumer, selecting the most attractive product from a suite of alternatives. What is in focus here is the ‘usefulness’ of the university in furthering a young person’s professional advancement – the ‘usefulness’ of a university degree in the marketplace of employment. However, as Flattery and Rooney know only too well (both are graduates of Trinity College Dublin and both use literary fiction to pillory the contemporary university as neoliberal institution), attending university in 2024 is no longer a guarantor of steady employment, of social mobility, or of cultural cachet.

Such, then, is the usefulness (or not) of a university education for its students – but what of the university’s use to society more broadly? This question has emerged at a time when public investment in universities has significantly diminished, thus reducing their power to compete in a global knowledge economy. Their response has been to diversify their funding sources, internationalise their recruitment base, widen their curricular offerings, and offer greater consultancy services (Harford 2018, 2021). Equally, university institutions have endeavoured to demonstrate the ways in which higher education contributes to economic good and social stability; arguably, such attempts at demonstration represent a regressively functionalist view (Minogue 1973), in which education is justified of as an instrument for economic progress. The net impact of this shift is that the original idea of higher education as intrinsically worthwhile, in and of itself, is at risk.

In line with this functionalist model, discourses of instrumentalism and managerialism have increasingly infiltrated the university space with universities globally having to re-invent themselves in order to maintain currency and position in a post-industrial global knowledge economy. Critics argue that an appetite to compete within a globalised education marketplace has strengthened managerialist practices and weakened the notion of education as a public good; revised priorities on this economic model include fiscal efficiency, measurable outputs, and marketable practices (Mahon 2021; Hall 2020; Oravec 2019; Smyth 2017; Wright and Shore 2017). Critics further suggest that the civic discourse of the university has been gradually replaced by the language of commercialization, privatization, and deregulation (Berg and Seeber 2016; Barbour 2016) where priority is increasingly given to measures of performance and output – to ‘developing capability in research analytics’ in the terms of University College Dublin’s latest strategy document, so that ‘research performance expectations will be set and performance will be measured’ (UCD Strategy 2019).

This neoliberal impetus is anticipated to an uncanny degree in Newman’s discourses, which provide an interesting point of reference in the face of what Barnett calls the university’s ‘lurch’ towards performativity (Barnett 2004, 64). Certain commentators, Newman writes, ‘insist that Education should be confined to some particular and narrow end, and should issue in some definite work, which can be weighed and measured.’ These commentators, he continues:

argue as if every thing, as well as every person, had its price; and that where there has been a great outlay, they have a right to expect a return in kind. This they call making Education and Instruction ‘useful,’ and ‘Utility’ becomes their watchword. With a fundamental principle of this nature, they very naturally go on to ask, what there is to show for the expense of a University; what is the real worth in the market of the article called ‘a Liberal Education,’ on the supposition that it does not teach us definitely how to advance our manufactures, or to improve our lands, or to better our civil economy; or again, if it does not at once make this man a lawyer, that an engineer, and that a surgeon; or at least if it does not lead to discoveries in chemistry, astronomy, geology, magnetism, and science of every kind.

As Miller points out, Newman is not arguing here for the abolition of the professional within a higher system of learning. ‘He is perfectly clear that professional disciplines have their place in the university, as they had from its medieval beginnings: what he is concerned to stress is that in addition to professional training one must aim at the intellectual virtues; indeed, the inculcation of the intellectual virtues ought to be part and parcel of professional “training” (or, rather, education)’ (Miller, 2019, 1693). Working within the limited framework of ‘useful’ versus ‘useless,’ it is difficult to find discursive space for the ‘intellectual virtues’ as Newman conceived of them. It is difficult to identify the emancipatory or formative potential of higher education when increasingly noisy neoliberal ideologies clamour for attention in the protean and ‘entrepreneurial university’ (Arroyabe, Schumann, and Carlos 2022).

Interestingly, the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic shed new light on these discussions and tensions. In many ways, the pandemic brought to the surface a related set of issues which had been bubbling for some time, namely that in a technocratic utility-focused neoliberal age, the ends of education (and not just the means) were rarely debated. During the pandemic, the focus of academic energies pivoted abruptly to delivering the commodity that is education, and this same pivot forced a reflection on whether education-as-commodity should be the priority in the first place. At the heart of these reflections is the philosophical question of education’s purpose, particularly in a post-pandemic world (Carrigan et al. 2023). Is it a mode of ‘banking’, ‘a process of living’, a means for credentialization, a training for the professional world, or an opportunity for young people to become genuinely transformed as they take on the ‘powerful knowledge’ of their disciplinary fields (Ashwin 2020)? Can it be any or all of the above?

Let us give Newman the final word on this, as we appreciate the contemporary resonance of his statement that ‘Useful knowledge’ has done its work, and Liberal Knowledge has certainly not done its work.’ ‘Knowledge is a state or condition of mind,’ he continues, ‘and since cultivation of mind is surely worth seeking for its own sake, we are thus brought once more to the conclusion, which the word “Liberal” and the word “Philosophy” have already suggested, that there is a Knowledge, which is desirable, though nothing come of it, as being of itself a treasure, and a sufficient remuneration of years of labour’ (Newman 1996, 112). As we have been arguing throughout this piece, the intrinsic value of knowledge, together with the cultivation of individual and communal relationship, goes to the very heart of Newman’s educational vision. In a post-pandemic context, his classic work reminds us of the very real potential of universities to inspire a democratic culture – where educational goods of self-enlargement and solidarity can mutually enrich and enliven. These goods might not be entirely ‘useful,’ to be sure, but they are certainly valuable.

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