cardinal newman, universities, the goods of the thinking

i have recently begun reading john henry newman's "the idea of a university." i was surprised to find that newman draws a sharp distinction between "academies" and "universities." the former exists to promote the advancement and discovery of knowledge, while the latter exists to teach knowledge to students. in his preface, newman suggests that those who make discoveries and advance knowledge are not necessarily good teachers, and vice-versa. he also argues that advancing knowledge is a characteristically private enterprise, the work of the lone scholars in their respective studies. he notes (thankfully) Socrates as a potential exception.

there is certainly something to newman's distinction between advancing knowledge and teaching knowledge. it is certainly an academic commonplace that professors famous for "advancing knowledge" in some area turn out to be poor teachers. at the same time, however, i find myself wanting to resist making too sharp a distinction between these two kinds of activities. isn't there a way in which teaching characteristically -and not only occasionally- helps the teacher to learn, and perhaps to learn in a way that she couldn't otherwise? i suppose this depends a lot on the difference in capability between teacher and student. a prof might learn quite a bit from her grad students, but a grade school teacher probably doesn't learn much about spelling from her students...

its interesting to note that the terminology seems to have shifted from newman's time to our own (or, at least, in making the trip across the atlantic). we now think of a university as a place that focuses on the advancment of knowledge, in contrast with a "college", which focuses on teaching undergrads. and it is, of course, a very popular thing these days for colleges to remake themselves into universities, even if this change seems to be mostly in name. why is this, we might well ask? certainly it is connected to some sense that being a "real" place of learning inolves producing scholarship -i.e. generating experiments, articles, books.

there is, i think, a kind of madness that accompanies the contemporary academies obsession with the "production" of knowledge. it is not clear who is benefiting, or if there is any benefit at all, from the flood of articles that comes out month after month. what's more, it seems clear that the pressure to produce results in a lot of rushed, and therefore shallow, thinking, as evidenced by the tons of low-quality articles that are constantly appearing in print. what, then, is the impetus behind this rush to "advance" knowledge? perhaps it is the desire to have something tangible to hold onto, to show for all our efforts (including our fund-raising efforts). if there is an article in hand, then we can be sure that we've done something, that we've made progress. and then we can be sure that this whole enterprise was worthwhile, that is was good. perhaps behind this is a picture of learning as another form of production -just as we produce goods and the more goods the better (more cell phones, more cars, more dvds, etc), so we produce academic "goods", and the more we can produce the better the good of learning.

but there is another conception of learning -or at least humanistic learning- in which progress can't be displayed by pointing to an article, precisely because one never actually makes "progress." the enterprise of learning isn't worthwhile or good because it results in something; rather, learning (perhaps we should say contemplation) holds it good within itself. on this view of the matter, we never get "beyond" the man sitting beneath a tree and thinking hard about why there is anything at all. that man already has, so to speak, the good which there is to be had from thinking, and no amount of published articles will give him a better good from thinking. which is not to forget, of course, but is exactly to remember, that there are many goods which cannot be gotten just by thinking.

remembering soldiers, pursuing peace

as a christian with deep sympathies for peace theology, i find it difficult to know exactly how to think about memorial day. by "peace theology" i mean a theology which sees non-violence and reconciliation as central to the message of Jesus and the New Testament. on the one hand, i have a strong desire to take seriously -and to honor- the sacrifices of those soldiers who gave their lives fighting for this country. and it is not only that i feel a sense of obligation to honor these soldiers. rather, i geniunely find their stories and their sacrifices to be profoundly moving. there is somethng about the virtue of courage, about the willingness to sacrifice or even die for others, that i find almost singularly awe-inspiring. no doubt i run the risk of romanticising what is horrible, and no doubt i have no real conception of how horrible and unromantic war actually is. neveretheless, when i imagine a soldier who willingly risks his or her life in battle, i feel that i am in the presence of something deep and beautiful. on the other hand, insofar as i am a person committed to a theology of peace, i see war -including the acts committed by the soldiers who are remembered at memorial day- as antithetical to the way of Jesus, which is the way of hope and salvation. not only this, but many of those soldiers who made sacrifices, even sacrificing their lives, were also people who harmed and destroyed, who killed and maimed.

there are, then, at least two points of tension here. the first tension is about a death in war. is such a death noble and powerful and valuable? or is it a kind of mistake -an offering made to a false god of war? if it is the later, then it is an act that may ultimately be redeemed, but it is not itself a force for redemption; it will only be redeemed in spite of itself. the second tension is about how to construe the soldiers themselves. do i think of them as heroes -people who understood the deepest things in human life? or as well-meaning but mislead, and perhaps even as villains? these two contstruals don't seem to sit well together. i'm not sure how to put them together, and i'm not sure i want to give up either of them.

whatever the right way to think about all of this is, i suspect that it will involve what a friend said to me yesterday: 'at the heart of the gospel is the experience of suffering. at the heart of what Jesus taught us is how to suffer.'

when st. francis received his first vision, he was on his way to battle as a soldier. he abandoned his career in the military, and fell in love with Lady Poverty. and once, after preaching to his sisters the birds, he blessed them, and they flew away in four directions, thus making the sign of the cross.