Newman’s “Idea of a University” as Foundation for Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts Programs
Levan Ramishvili
Newman’s “Idea of a University” as a Foundation for Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts Programs
By Gina Elia
As liberal arts programs lose popularity in favor of STEM fields with clearer job pathways at the university level, they should find ways to appeal to more students if they hope to survive. One solution is to adopt interdisciplinary courses of study that show how different theoretical fields complement one another in solving real-world problems. Saint John Henry Newman's Idea of a University, published in 1852, provides an adaptable framework that can inform the development of contemporary interdisciplinary liberal arts programs, ensuring they remain relevant and intellectually robust. Many K-12 liberal arts programs follow Newman’s model, providing a set of contemporary examples toward which universities could look to reform their own liberal arts programs.
The Merit of Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts Studies
To showcase the ongoing relevance of a liberal arts education to students, programs should emphasize the roles of generalists, as opposed to specialists, in a society’s infrastructure. As a teacher, I see in my students and their parents a belief that to be successful, young people should become specialists: engineers, doctors, computer programmers, investment bankers, and so on. However, generalists also exist in every industry. They are the consultants, government workers, coordinators, K-12 teachers, administrators, human resources personnel, and countless other professionals who keep society afloat.
Dan Shipper, the CEO and cofounder of Every, an online media outlet exploring the role of AI in contemporary society, argues that being a generalist is more important than ever now that AI can do more technical, specialized work. “Being a generalist,” he writes, “gives us something that language models don’t have: the capacity to learn quickly, and to see and solve novel problems in new domains. In an allocation economy, the person who wins isn’t the expert who knows the exact answer to a question. It’s the one who knows which questions to ask in the first place.” AI bots like ChatGPT can complete specialist tasks like computing equations and translating text, but they fall short of creative problem-solving in areas where there are few or no pre-existing solutions or explanations. For this, we need generalists, whose training enables them to make thoughtful decisions by drawing on different disciplines for broad insight into issues they need to resolve.
Interdisciplinary liberal arts programs highlight the relevance of the liberal arts disciplines to students by showcasing the integrated way in which generalist practitioners, anyone from consultants to operations teams to management, draw on knowledge from different fields to solve problems. A number of universities and colleges offer interdisciplinary liberal arts programs, and they also already exist at specialized K-12 schools throughout the country. Liberal arts programs must be careful, however, not to design so-called “integrated” study that superficially skims over different disciplines. Christopher Jencks, a professor emeritus of social policy, and sociologist David Riesman describe integrative studies in their book, The Academic Revolution, as “characteristically shallow, trading intellectual rigor for topical excitement.”
Newman understood this challenge of interdisciplinary liberal arts study. On the one hand, he writes that students should understand that the subjects they study do not exist in isolation, but rather
…form together a whole or system; that they run into each other, and complete each other, and that, in proportion to our view of them as a whole, is the exactness and trustworthiness of the knowledge which they separately convey.
Yet, anticipating the later critiques of Riesman and Jencks, he cautions against overloading students with too much information. To prevent this, he maintains that instructors and institutions should frame liberal arts study within a guiding philosophy for how education should develop students as people, beyond just their intellect. For him, the fruit of a successful liberal arts education is “a habit of mind…which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom.” Teachers and students achieve this by centering their studies on shared guiding principles, which helps them make sense of all knowledge they learn. Instructors in Newman’s model are thus responsible not only for the intellectual but also the social–emotional and moral formation of their students. Together, these attributes of Newman’s model of liberal arts education ensure that interdisciplinary studies are focused and meaningful.
The Value of the Vision and Mission Statements
For Newman, the central framework of interdisciplinary arts study was the teaching of the Catholic Church. Martha McMackin Garland of Ohio State University explains that in Newman’s conception,
…students would be expected—with their instructors’ conscientious, explicit help, and in all their classes—to remember that they were Catholics; to integrate their understanding of classics, mathematics, and the sciences into their own religious worldview; and to make sense of everything in terms of the understanding they had of their relationship to their church and to their God.
However, the broad wording of Newman’s model of liberal arts studies leaves room to implement it while replacing its central guiding principles with any number of alternatives. Sarah Castro-Klarén of Johns Hopkins University writes, “[Newmans’] emphasis on the idea of the universal lingers with all its other extensive meanings, so modern teachers and students may follow his urging to universality and go far beyond him to appreciate cultures and civilizations he disparaged.” While it would be unrealistic to expect all modern K-12 schools and universities to adopt the same guiding framework, Newman’s model does not require that they do; a school’s central framework could be the IB Learning Profile, the teachings of other religious traditions, or any other set of principles. Newman’s model is ideal for contemporary interdisciplinary liberal arts programs for the mere fact of its organization around an agreed-upon central framework that teachers believe is their mission to instill in students. Most K-12 schools have such a framework, which they call a “vision,” as well as an accompanying mission statement that is shorter and lays out the goal toward which all learning at each school strives.
Vision and mission statements are not without their issues. In fact, they are now controversial at public schools, as parents, schools, and states debate the extent to which diversity and inclusion issues should be taught in public education. Institutionally committing to certain priorities while excluding others will always ignite the ire of some members of that institution. For these reasons, many colleges have abandoned mission statements. But this has come at a high cost. Mintz laments that higher education has lost its sense of aim and priorities. The lack of vision statements at the university level plays no small part in why liberal arts programs are flailing so much more than they are in K-12 education. With no unifying goal, liberal arts departments become fragmented, which makes their relevance less obvious, since practitioners draw on the knowledge of multiple disciplines at once to solve problems. The lack of a unifying framework allows parochialism to run rampant in liberal arts programs. Mintz and Garland argue this is caused by issues such as the need of individual departments to justify their worth as they vie for funding as well as the development of overly specialized liberal arts courses reflecting professors’ research agendas. Such specialization obscures how knowledge learned in one field is related to another and, consequently, to the world more broadly.
One example of a university that successfully employs a mission statement to imbue its liberal arts curriculum with purpose and focus is the University of Notre Dame (UND). Part of its mission statement reads that:
as a Catholic university…one of its distinctive goals is to provide a forum where…the various lines of Catholic thought may intersect with all the forms of knowledge found in the arts, sciences, professions, and every other area of human scholarship and creativity.
Its core curriculum “reflects the University’s shared vision for a modern Catholic liberal arts education…that transcends traditional department boundaries,” requiring students to take a broad array of liberal arts courses exposing them to the different forms of knowledge and how they interrelate. While exact data on how many graduates of UND have liberal arts degrees is not readily available, the university’s focus on interdisciplinary liberal arts learning suggests that more than a few do.
UND demonstrates that it is possible to focus the learning at a university successfully around a central mission statement and set of guiding principles, but it is necessary that a university commit to a specific philosophy to do so. In this regard, it is easier for religiously affiliated universities like UND to organize their learning in this way than unaffiliated research universities. Still, students have more choice of where to attend college than K-12, and they should be encouraged to attend universities whose mission statements and philosophical frameworks align with their own values. Such statements would also help students better discern which universities are right for them. If it is too daunting to organize the learning of an entire college of arts and sciences around one mission statement and guiding framework, schools could start at the departmental level, asking heads of each discipline to clearly delineate their mission and/or guiding principles.
The Teacher as Educator of the Whole Student, Not Just the Intellect
The teacher plays a crucial role in John Henry Newman’s model of an integrated liberal arts course of study as a role model for students learning how to develop a broad-minded approach to thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving. John Thompson, a high school teacher, clarifies that for Newman, “what is needed is an intentional, unifying concept or idea. Having this integrated curriculum encourages moral and intellectual development of students through a personal student-teacher relationship.” The teacher’s investment in the student’s formation overall as a person is inextricably linked to the interdisciplinary liberal arts program’s central focus or mission. Having a set of principles by which to live gives teachers a sense of what kind of behavior and thinking they should model for their students.
This way of conceiving the teacher–student relationship is still common in K-12 schools, probably because students are legal minors. Administrators, teachers, and parents alike still envision teachers as sharing a role in the intellectual, social, and even sometimes moral formation of their students. Administration at most independent schools assign teachers with groups of students whose social–emotional growth they monitor throughout those students’ years at the school. Additionally, it is an expectation of adults employed at K-12 schools to monitor the social, mental, and emotional well-being of all the students in their community and to report concerns to school counselors, administrators, and/or parents. At the university level, however, professors have all but forgotten their role as leaders of young people. Mintz, in his advocacy for radically re-imagined liberal arts programs at universities, writes extensively about reclaiming the idea of educating the whole student, including fostering a sense of belonging and encouraging civic engagement in addition to making lower-level liberal arts courses more interdisciplinary and applied. Most college students are just learning how to live on their own and would benefit from the guidance of older, more experienced adults.
Castro-Klarén argues that Newman’s model of teacher as leader encourages an authoritarian, unidirectional relationship. Yet, this ignores the reality that many college freshmen have only been out of high school for a few months and are just beginning to learn how to live on their own. It is unrealistic to expect them to know how to think and behave as older adults do; they attend university in part to grow up. In two recent articles in The Atlantic, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” and “How Gen Z Came To See Books as a Waste of Time,” journalist Rose Horowitch quotes 33 professors who lament that students are arriving from high school woefully unprepared for the level of reading and thinking expected of them in college-level humanities courses. Horowitch writes that most of the professors with whom she spoke pinpoint the issue as becoming especially pronounced over the past 10–20 years.
Yet, perhaps professors also overestimate how prepared they should expect the recent high school graduates sitting in their classrooms to be. Academia has also changed over the past few decades. Research, not teaching, is the main measure of success for careers at large research universities, since it leads to measurable outcomes that departments use to justify their worth and continue to receive funding. For professors at such universities, teaching is an obligation that takes them away from their research. Perhaps it would be easier for them, given such a context, if young undergraduates were less needy. Yet, just because the landscape of academia has changed for professors does not mean that the needs of young adults have. It is still the job of university instructors to deepen and solidify skills like critical and analytical thinking in undergraduates, continuing work begun by the students’ earlier teachers. After all, a university is still a school.
Conclusion
Interdisciplinary liberal arts programs highlight the ongoing relevance of the liberal arts to contemporary life, and Newman’s model of liberal arts study provides an ideal roadmap for how to create a program that would encourage focused, meaningful interdisciplinary learning. It organizes interdisciplinary study around a set of guiding principles, or vision statement, that directs both the learning and teaching toward developing the whole student, rather than just the intellect. On the whole, K-12 schools do a better job than most universities of framing integrated liberal arts studies, when they offer them, in ways that make their importance to working and living in the adult world obvious to students. As universities face increasing pressure to prepare students for employment in the twenty-first century, it’s crucial that their liberal arts programs also adapt without losing their core mission of cultivating critical, well-rounded thinkers. Following Newman’s model, they could begin by adopting vision and/or mission statements at the departmental level, collaborating with different departments to form interdisciplinary courses and programs, and communicating to professors the importance of participating in at least the intellectual formation of their students, if not also their social–emotional and moral formation.
These objectives may seem unrealistic in a world where universities—even at the departmental level—are terrified of aligning with one set of principles against others, where departments compete with each other for funding, and where professors feel pressure to prioritize their research over their teaching. Yet, as enrollment drops, it is clear that university liberal arts departments are not sufficiently demonstrating their importance to students. It might just take adapting Newman’s model of interdisciplinary liberal arts study—almost 200 years old, yet radically different from how many university liberal arts programs currently operate—to break this cycle.