Newman’s “Idea of a University” as a Foundation for Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts Programs: Part I

As liberal arts programs lose popularity in favor of STEM fields with clearer job pathways at the university level, they should find ways to appeal to more students if they hope to survive. One solution is to adopt interdisciplinary courses of study that show how different theoretical fields complement one another in solving real-world problems. Saint John Henry Newman's Idea of a University, published in 1852, provides an adaptable framework that can inform the development of contemporary interdisciplinary liberal arts programs, ensuring they remain relevant and intellectually robust. Many K-12 liberal arts programs follow Newman’s model, providing a set of contemporary examples toward which universities could look to reform their own liberal arts programs.

The Merit of Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts Studies

Philosophia et septem artes liberales ("philosophy and the seven liberal arts) from the Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg (12th century).

To showcase the ongoing relevance of a liberal arts education to students, programs should emphasize the roles of generalists, as opposed to specialists, in a society’s infrastructure. As a teacher, I see in my students and their parents a belief that to be successful, young people should become specialists: engineers, doctors, computer programmers, investment bankers, and so on. However, generalists also exist in every industry. They are the consultants, government workers, coordinators, K-12 teachers, administrators, human resources personnel, and countless other professionals who keep society afloat.

Dan Shipper, the CEO and cofounder of Every, an online media outlet exploring the role of AI in contemporary society, argues that being a generalist is more important than ever now that AI can do more technical, specialized work. “Being a generalist,” he writes, “gives us something that language models don’t have: the capacity to learn quickly, and to see and solve novel problems in new domains. In an allocation economy, the person who wins isn’t the expert who knows the exact answer to a question. It’s the one who knows which questions to ask in the first place.” AI bots like ChatGPT can complete specialist tasks like computing equations and translating text, but they fall short of creative problem-solving in areas where there are few or no pre-existing solutions or explanations. For this, we need generalists, whose training enables them to make thoughtful decisions by drawing on different disciplines for broad insight into issues they need to resolve.

Interdisciplinary liberal arts programs highlight the relevance of the liberal arts disciplines to students by showcasing the integrated way in which generalist practitioners, anyone from consultants to operations teams to management, draw on knowledge from different fields to solve problems. A number of universities and colleges offer interdisciplinary liberal arts programs, and they also already exist at specialized K-12 schools throughout the country. Liberal arts programs must be careful, however, not to design so-called “integrated” study that superficially skims over different disciplines. Christopher Jencks, a professor emeritus of social policy, and sociologist David Riesman describe integrative studies in their book, The Academic Revolution, as “characteristically shallow, trading intellectual rigor for topical excitement.”

Newman understood this challenge of interdisciplinary liberal arts study. On the one hand, he writes that students should understand that the subjects they study do not exist in isolation, but rather

…form together a whole or system; that they run into each other, and complete each other, and that, in proportion to our view of them as a whole, is the exactness and trustworthiness of the knowledge which they separately convey.

Yet, anticipating the later critiques of Riesman and Jencks, he cautions against overloading students with too much information. To prevent this, he maintains that instructors and institutions should frame liberal arts study within a guiding philosophy for how education should develop students as people, beyond just their intellect. For him, the fruit of a successful liberal arts education is “a habit of mind…which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom.” Teachers and students achieve this by centering their studies on shared guiding principles, which helps them make sense of all knowledge they learn. Instructors in Newman’s model are thus responsible not only for the intellectual but also the social–emotional and moral formation of their students. Together, these attributes of Newman’s model of liberal arts education ensure that interdisciplinary studies are focused and meaningful.

The Value of the Vision and Mission Statements

For Newman, the central framework of interdisciplinary arts study was the teaching of the Catholic Church. Martha McMackin Garland of Ohio State University explains that in Newman’s conception,

…students would be expected—with their instructors’ conscientious, explicit help, and in all their classes—to remember that they were Catholics; to integrate their understanding of classics, mathematics, and the sciences into their own religious worldview; and to make sense of everything in terms of the understanding they had of their relationship to their church and to their God.

However, the broad wording of Newman’s model of liberal arts studies leaves room to implement it while replacing its central guiding principles with any number of alternatives. Sarah Castro-Klarén of Johns Hopkins University writes, “[Newmans’] emphasis on the idea of the universal lingers with all its other extensive meanings, so modern teachers and students may follow his urging to universality and go far beyond him to appreciate cultures and civilizations he disparaged.” While it would be unrealistic to expect all modern K-12 schools and universities to adopt the same guiding framework, Newman’s model does not require that they do; a school’s central framework could be the IB Learning Profile, the teachings of other religious traditions, or any other set of principles. Newman’s model is ideal for contemporary interdisciplinary liberal arts programs for the mere fact of its organization around an agreed-upon central framework that teachers believe is their mission to instill in students. Most K-12 schools have such a framework, which they call a “vision,” as well as an accompanying mission statement that is shorter and lays out the goal toward which all learning at each school strives.

Vision and mission statements are not without their issues. In fact, they are now controversial at public schools, as parents, schools, and states debate the extent to which diversity and inclusion issues should be taught in public education. Institutionally committing to certain priorities while excluding others will always ignite the ire of some members of that institution. For these reasons, many colleges have abandoned mission statements. But this has come at a high cost. Mintz laments that higher education has lost its sense of aim and priorities. The lack of vision statements at the university level plays no small part in why liberal arts programs are flailing so much more than they are in K-12 education. With no unifying goal, liberal arts departments become fragmented, which makes their relevance less obvious, since practitioners draw on the knowledge of multiple disciplines at once to solve problems. The lack of a unifying framework allows parochialism to run rampant in liberal arts programs. Mintz and Garland argue this is caused by issues such as the need of individual departments to justify their worth as they vie for funding as well as the development of overly specialized liberal arts courses reflecting professors’ research agendas. Such specialization obscures how knowledge learned in one field is related to another and, consequently, to the world more broadly.

One example of a university that successfully employs a mission statement to imbue its liberal arts curriculum with purpose and focus is the University of Notre Dame (UND). Part of its mission statement reads that:

as a Catholic university…one of its distinctive goals is to provide a forum where…the various lines of Catholic thought may intersect with all the forms of knowledge found in the arts, sciences, professions, and every other area of human scholarship and creativity.

Its core curriculum “reflects the University’s shared vision for a modern Catholic liberal arts education…that transcends traditional department boundaries,” requiring students to take a broad array of liberal arts courses exposing them to the different forms of knowledge and how they interrelate. While exact data on how many graduates of UND have liberal arts degrees is not readily available, the university’s focus on interdisciplinary liberal arts learning suggests that more than a few do.

 UND demonstrates that it is possible to focus the learning at a university successfully around a central mission statement and set of guiding principles, but it is necessary that a university commit to a specific philosophy to do so. In this regard, it is easier for religiously affiliated universities like UND to organize their learning in this way than unaffiliated research universities. Still, students have more choice of where to attend college than K-12, and they should be encouraged to attend universities whose mission statements and philosophical frameworks align with their own values. Such statements would also help students better discern which universities are right for them. If it is too daunting to organize the learning of an entire college of arts and sciences around one mission statement and guiding framework, schools could start at the departmental level, asking heads of each discipline to clearly delineate their mission and/or guiding principles.

 Part II of this essay will go live on Tuesday, March 18, 2025.

Gina Elia is a freelance writer and high school world language teacher at an independent school in Coconut Creek, Florida. She holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.