The University as a Site of Resistance
Abstract
Saint John Henry Newman’s Idea of a University may not be the best meditation on higher education—Plato’s Republic has that honor—but it is nonetheless a classic. At its heart is a simple idea: to know any discipline well, one must also know well every other discipline—for only in knowing well every other discipline does one know the limits of that discipline. It is only by knowing history, for example, that one can know the limits of economics: the assumptions of economics are assumptions—and, as such, hold only in certain times and places.
But what does Ireland have to do with any of this? Well, Saint John Henry Newman argues that studying at a university makes one a gentleman—but I argue that it does rather more than this: at its best, the university is the site of resistance. For it puts into context the claims of the mighty: it shows their assumptions to be no more than assumptions—and so open to question.
Capitalism cannot allow its assumptions to be called into question. But capitalism needs the university—needs, at any rate, the specialists whom the university trains. And so capitalism has within itself, potentially, a site of resistance to itself. And something similar was true of subjugated Ireland, whether Saint John Henry Newman knew it or not.