The Idea of the University: A Re-examination.

Jaroslav Pelikan Yale University Press, $30, 238 pp.

Jaroslav Pelikan is one of our great scholars and he has written a positively scholastic book on the idea of the university. In the high period of medieval scholasticism, commentary was an accomplished art. All the great scholastic philosophers cut their theological teeth writing a Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. (Peter Lombard had collected in an organized schema the varying traditions of theological opinion; succeeding scholars tried to sort out and rationalize the array.) One could well label Pelikan's effort A Commentary on the Sentences of John Henry Newman.

Pelikan's commentary is, of course, not on the whole corpus of Newman's writings but on the series of writings collected under the title The Idea of the University published in 1873. The majority of the eighteen chapters of Pelikan's treatment begin with a quotation from Newman which then becomes the theme for discussing the relevance of the idea for contemporary twentieth-century university concerns. Not only is the idea of commentary on a classic text scholastic in inspiration, the very method would have delighted Thomas Aquinas. Pelikan follows an informal sic et non dialectic in which various positions on vexatious issues like teaching versus research, or pure scholarship versus social service are carefully arrayed in a yes/no fashion. Having set forth the protagonists, Pelikan scours the historical tradition on the subject as only a great scholar can, and then ends with a version of "I-answer-that" in which he states his own opinion, often revising and expanding on Newman. (Pelikan gently edges Newman's idea of a university in the direction of the modern research institution which the cardinal rather resolutely rejected in his original discourses.)

Commenting on Newman is a worthy endeavor. No single work has probably influenced university rhetoric more. Newman's book is the mainstay of university presidents searching for elegant quotations in support of the pursuit of knowledge and the liberal arts. The problem with Idea is whether it has ever moved beyond the presidential address. It certainly did not in its original offering.

The Irish author, Louis McRedmond, offers a very different commentary on Newman which might serve as a counterweight to Pelikan's essay. In Thrown among Strangers--John Henry Newman in Ireland (Veritas), McRedmond recounts in lively and fascinating detail the utter failure of the project for which Idea was to be the blueprint. Newman had been called to Ireland in 1851 to be the rector of a new Catholic University of Ireland, and his discourses outlined to his Dublin audience his vision of such an institution. McRedmond concludes "Broadly speaking ... Newman's Idea has attracted no comprehensive endorsement." Broadly speaking, McRedmond would appear to be correct. On the specifics of Catholic universities, most have operated under clerical control which Newman dreaded. Contemporary secular universities (and colleges) in general have been deeply colored by the German research model which was emerging at the time Newman wrote. Newman did not read German, had little interest in or knowledge of that development, and the image of the university which hovers in his mind is an earlier Oxford not a contemporary Berlin.

Given the anachronistic or transitional characterization of the university offered in the original Idea, Pelikan's update does for the cardinal what Thomas did for the fathers of the church: reconcile traditional doctrine to emerging science (Aristotle/Germanic research). Pelikan accomplishes his task with the balance and care that one would expect from someone who is so thoroughly himself a scholarly creature of the university.

Even with modern commentary, however, there seems to me an essential flaw in both the original and the update. Both works are so fixated on the idea of the university, that I believe they miss the problem of the institution of the university. (I write as a university president!) I am not certain that Newman or Pelikan can differentiate between the idea of an intellectual community and the idea of a university. There have been intellectual communities, I suppose, since Socrates' circle of friends and disciples. Monasteries, cathedral schools, ashrams, the Hoover Institute are plausible intellectual communities that do not emerge as universities. Certain special conditions of twelfth-century Europe led to the rise of the peculiar institutional entity we have inherited as universities. We are uncertain what the conditions were that precipitated this organization for the intellect. Some combination of medieval corporatism, papal patronage, the rise of the cities and so on presumably created the institution of the university. Newman's Idea failed of institutional reality because the historical conditions in Ireland in the 1850s were wholly out of keeping with his transcendent vision of intellectual community.

Pelikan's treatment for all its wisdom has trouble with the institution of the university. Thus, in his treatment of libraries he is favorably inclined toward Carlyle's epigram: "The true university ... is a Collection of Books." Pelikan says that the notion is an "oversimplification" but in the right direction. I would be inclined to say that Carlyle is straight out confused. A university is not at all like a library (or a laboratory), however much it may use the same.

If universities are in trouble today--they are!--I suspect it is not the ideology that needs fixing, it is the institutional assumptions ranging from financial structure to tenure contracts to pedagogy that need to be assayed. As an instance of intellectual community, the university of the day should attend to the grand ideology of the Idea's here discussed, but our real crises may well be in the financial aid budget and indirect cost recovery.