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

Part I of this essay is available here.

The Teacher as Educator of the Whole Student, Not Just the Intellect

The teacher plays a crucial role in John Henry Newman’s model of an integrated liberal arts course of study as a role model for students learning how to develop a broad-minded approach to thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving. John Thompson, a high school teacher, clarifies that for Newman, “what is needed is an intentional, unifying concept or idea. Having this integrated curriculum encourages moral and intellectual development of students through a personal student-teacher relationship.” The teacher’s investment in the student’s formation overall as a person is inextricably linked to the interdisciplinary liberal arts program’s central focus or mission. Having a set of principles by which to live gives teachers a sense of what kind of behavior and thinking they should model for their students.

Photograph of Newman by Herbert Rose Barraud, c. 1885

This way of conceiving the teacher–student relationship is still common in K-12 schools, probably because students are legal minors. Administrators, teachers, and parents alike still envision teachers as sharing a role in the intellectual, social, and even sometimes moral formation of their students. Administration at most independent schools assign teachers with groups of students whose social–emotional growth they monitor throughout those students’ years at the school. Additionally, it is an expectation of adults employed at K-12 schools to monitor the social, mental, and emotional well-being of all the students in their community and to report concerns to school counselors, administrators, and/or parents. At the university level, however, professors have all but forgotten their role as leaders of young people. Mintz, in his advocacy for radically re-imagined liberal arts programs at universities, writes extensively about reclaiming the idea of educating the whole student, including fostering a sense of belonging and encouraging civic engagement in addition to making lower-level liberal arts courses more interdisciplinary and applied. Most college students are just learning how to live on their own and would benefit from the guidance of older, more experienced adults.

Castro-Klarén argues that Newman’s model of teacher as leader encourages an authoritarian, unidirectional relationship. Yet, this ignores the reality that many college freshmen have only been out of high school for a few months and are just beginning to learn how to live on their own. It is unrealistic to expect them to know how to think and behave as older adults do; they attend university in part to grow up. In two recent articles in The Atlantic, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”  and “How Gen Z Came To See Books as a Waste of Time,”  journalist Rose Horowitch quotes 33 professors who lament that students are arriving from high school woefully unprepared for the level of reading and thinking expected of them in college-level humanities courses. Horowitch writes that most of the professors with whom she spoke pinpoint the issue as becoming especially pronounced over the past 10–20 years.

Portrait miniature of Newman by William Charles Ross

Yet, perhaps professors also overestimate how prepared they should expect the recent high school graduates sitting in their classrooms to be. Academia has also changed over the past few decades. Research, not teaching, is the main measure of success for careers at large research universities, since it leads to measurable outcomes that departments use to justify their worth and continue to receive funding. For professors at such universities, teaching is an obligation that takes them away from their research. Perhaps it would be easier for them, given such a context, if young undergraduates were less needy. Yet, just because the landscape of academia has changed for professors does not mean that the needs of young adults have. It is still the job of university instructors to deepen and solidify skills like critical and analytical thinking in undergraduates, continuing work begun by the students’ earlier teachers. After all, a university is still a school.  

Conclusion

Interdisciplinary liberal arts programs highlight the ongoing relevance of the liberal arts to contemporary life, and Newman’s model of liberal arts study provides an ideal roadmap for how to create a program that would encourage focused, meaningful interdisciplinary learning. It organizes interdisciplinary study around a set of guiding principles, or vision statement, that directs both the learning and teaching toward developing the whole student, rather than just the intellect. On the whole, K-12 schools do a better job than most universities of framing integrated liberal arts studies, when they offer them, in ways that make their importance to working and living in the adult world obvious to students. As universities face increasing pressure to prepare students for employment in the twenty-first century, it’s crucial that their liberal arts programs also adapt without losing their core mission of cultivating critical, well-rounded thinkers. Following Newman’s model, they could begin by adopting vision and/or mission statements at the departmental level, collaborating with different departments to form interdisciplinary courses and programs, and communicating to professors the importance of participating in at least the intellectual formation of their students, if not also their social–emotional and moral formation.

These objectives may seem unrealistic in a world where universities—even at the departmental level—are terrified of aligning with one set of principles against others, where departments compete with each other for funding, and where professors feel pressure to prioritize their research over their teaching. Yet, as enrollment drops, it is clear that university liberal arts departments are not sufficiently demonstrating their importance to students. It might just take adapting Newman’s model of interdisciplinary liberal arts study—almost 200 years old, yet radically different from how many university liberal arts programs currently operate—to break this cycle.

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.