Few people have known more about how to develop the character of youth than Cardinal Newman.

The making of men
by Francis Phillips



The 'Making of Men'. The Idea and Reality of Newman's university in Oxford and Dublin by Paul Shrimpton

Today we have lost sight of what a university education should be about. It is seen as a strictly utilitarian process, imparting specialist knowledge for a future career. In a society where all beliefs are seen as relative and where young people are more worldly and sophisticated than ever before, tutors and lecturers feel no responsibility towards their students outside the lecture hall or seminar.

Yet this privileged period between leaving school and starting work is clearly a critical time for the young, a brief but intense space when, alongside the friendships they make with their peers, one would assume they might also require encouragement, direction and guidance from senior staff.

Even to suggest this notion is to be regarded as either entirely unrealistic or impossibly old-fashioned. Yet a gifted scholar, teacher and theologian in the middle of the 19th Century gave the subject of how to help form the next generation of men (higher education was not accessible to women until the latter part of the 19th Century) a great deal of serious thought and practical energy. This was Cardinal John Henry Newman.

The title of Dr Shrimpton’s sympathetic and scholarly study of Newman’s vision and practice of higher education, says it all. Newman, with his deep understanding of human nature and his instinctive sympathy for the aspirations and volatility of the young, recognised that reading for a degree is not merely about stretching the mind or fitting a candidate for a future career; it is also, or should be, about forming the moral and spiritual character of students. Academic studies are a necessary part of such formation but by no means the whole of it.

The author, who spent nine years researching this book alongside his full-time work for the last 28 years as a maths teacher at Magdalen College School, Oxford, argues that Newman’s administrative and practical gifts should be given their rightful place alongside his more celebrated writings. During the four years, from 1854 to 1858 when, single-handedly and under a colossal work-load, he undertook the task of starting a Catholic University in Dublin, Newman demonstrated the full range of his abilities: formulating his theories about the function and purpose of a university education in a series of lectures in Dublin in 1852, as well as house-buying, raising money, interviewing prospective tutors and lecturers, organising faculties and syllabuses and all the other minutiae necessary to starting an institution from scratch.

Newman’s industry, patience, capacity to work under pressure and in the face of many obstacles as described and examined in this book, was extraordinary. It also challenges those who are inclined to view him as an influential theologian and educational theorist rather than as the rector of a new university who also acted as head of one of its residential houses, having to oversee the staff, pacify the cook, buy the furniture and lay down rules for its lively and sometimes idle undergraduate residents.


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