Talk by Father( & Dr) Ian Ker, at Notre Dame University,Broadway, Sydney on Thursday 13th September 2007 @ 7:30 p.m.

Subject: Newman's Idea of a University: Is Catholic Education a Contradiction in Terms?

Newman broadly held the following ideas:

The are 7 discourses from 1852 from Newman about the characteristics that make up the idea of a university according to his developing Catholic thought.
People confused by 'liberal education' & misunderstand the term in relation to our prevailing culture.
A university living within colleges. Wanted the Heads of colleges and not Rectors to have more say.
First Discourse "Theology- a branch of Knowledge".
Third Discourse:" Bearing of other branches of knowledge on theology". Catholic Christian theology is a branch of knowledge.
Rejected the individualist attitude in education stemming from the Enlightenment.

Ethical truths cannot be discovered by the grossly immoral or amoral person.
1843 collection on Epistomology.
To think clearly is not enough. Power of distinguishing priorities, ethical & moral content from subject to subject, evaluation & judgment. Memory & imagination is not enough either. A mind may be lucid & logical but still indecisive on ethical & moral questions.
Policy of non-committment, lack of principle/view(liberal dogma & practice has 'moveable principles' and this is found not only in secular universities but also disturbingly within some Catholic universities.
Private Judgment pushes a false sovereignity from one branch of knowledge/or discipline over & above that of another.
Fr Ker then went on to explore the ideas of Professor Plantinga:
Scholarship cannot be neutral according to Professor Alvin Plantinga, University of Notre Dame ( USA)'s Dept of Philosophy. Plantinga, a Protestant scholar says that naturalistic philosophies from Epicurus influences liberal Protestant theologies & also the Enlightenment.
One branch of knowledge using its own thought forms & vocabulary then foisting it upon other branches of knowledge within universities and schools is contrary to Newman's thought.
Ancient philosophy from Pythagoras & more modern ones from Kant have the conception of the world being made by "man as the measure of all things". Don Cupitt explicitly atheist; Richard Rorty says there is not truth.

part 2 from my previous post:
Replacing Divine with human creativity- enlightenment epistemology ie 'truth as it appears to me'. No committment to objective truth; nor even to relative truth.
Contemporary intellectuals are into deconstructionism. Catholic students are influenced by the emphasis & the way in which subjects are taught. Professor Plantinga science & scholarship has become what I can get away with saying in a particular time and place( the cynical view of Rorty). Constructing the world's structure by the use of words; also evolutionary myths- unproven theories parading as proven fact.

Dawkins as a naturalist is not neutral in his line of argumenation. Professor Platinger says this about Dawkins in more general terms in his essay on the impossibility of neutrality in the university.
There is moveover no 'superior neutrality' at university- that is a myth.
Father Richard McBrien made the ridiculously banal statement that a Catholic university is "one with a chapel".
Professor Platinga on the other hand is the only one at Notre Dame University ( USA), who as a Protestant amongst Catholics who is actually supporting the traditional Catholic philosophies on what a Catholic Univesity should be ! Plantinga says that no university can be or play act that it is somehow neutral and/or disengaged.

FR Ian Ker has observed and concluded that at many Catholic universities today there are incoherent positions/disperate creeds/dogmatic non-Catholic credalists in most faculty departments eg literatire depts, Sociology, Philosophy. FR Ker recalled a Professor at Catholic Maynooth University in Ireland who accused him, who was visting as a guest speaker there, of being 'sectarian' for raising the issues in this talk. This was done during the 'vote of thanks' LOL. This is an indication that any search for truth and objectivity is seen as a threat. The Maynooth Professor during his strange 'vote of thanks' to Dr /Fr Ian Ker compared what Fr Ker was saying to the situation of Northern Ireland sectarianism ! As if to say that Fr Ker should not seek objective truth and order in university intellectual discourse

One thing is certain, a large proportion of university students are almost illiterate. I can say this with authority having taught undergraduates and graduates in health science and education.

Last week I marked a couple of hundred undergraduate papers for a "Dawkins" university and many of the students could hardly put a grammatical sentence together. The other two markers had the same experience. The saddest thing is that while we were marking them down for poor grammar, the lecturer was continuing to produce lecture notes with frequent grammatical errors.

If the university experience is to be meaningful, useful, respected, and value-for-money, the entry requirements need to be far tougher. The present cynical attitude adopted by university administrators whereby they take students' money and "pass" them without sufficient regard to the quality of teaching or learning is a disgrace.

The advantage of the Great Divergence was that Hunmankind learned how to learn. Apply theory to application. Yes, universities are necessary, but the lecturers/professors should have some mandatory years of work experience like with TAFE. I have worked 23 years in Industry, taught at uni and TAFE and twice have been an Academic Director over 15 years.

webby insightful, that sounds like how it used to be though huh? I had some contact with a seminary some time ago and was most impressed by the trainees perceptions. But they were not there after 7 years.

Today I think they,re for a career or industry now, once what the last poster was postulating. There in no doubt that university has changed, not necessarily for worst or better just changed.

The lack of literacy is to be mourned, as again the last poster said, but I think it is not the lecturers job to teach those skills, it belongs in the highschool and the interest in language begins in primary.
I remember an argument I had many years ago, with a primary teacher from one of the toughest areas of Sydney, she applauded the scrapping of punctuation, along with phrazing etc. How one would get thru life without that learning I puzzled.
Modern "speak" is not goodenough for uni even when studying mechanics in my humble. The lack of good communication was another friends job to fix in hospitals.
It starts early, a kicker could be the "Adventures of English" on TV
bloody facinating! and kids love TV in school hours.
fluff4

This article, and some of the comments, reminds me of getting my wrists slapped for suggesting back in the early 1990s that a barely literate undergraduate student consider taking up a trade, rather than wasting everybody's time and energy trying to complete a university degree.

I gave up teaching some years ago, and I hope that student took my advice. The idea that everybody is both capable of undertaking university studies successfully, and needs to do so in order to be a productive member of society, was always hopelessly flawed.