ADIEU ACADEME
It was a nice idea.
“A University is a place … where students come from every quarter for every kind of knowledge; … a place for the communication and circulation of thought … It is a place where inquiry is pushed forward … discoveries verified and perfected, and … error exposed, by the collision of mind with mind, and knowledge with knowledge…”
So wrote John Henry Newman in 1852.
A hundred years later I carried a copy of his The Idea of a University wherever I went in the hope it would make me interesting to young women. Well past all that now, I still keep a copy on my desk in the hope it will make me interesting to myself. I don’t open it. I fear the pages will crumble between my fingers. To be truthful I fear my fingers will crumble likewise.
I sell myself short. The other reason I carried The Idea of a University wherever I went was that I found it inspiring to dip into on a train, on a park bench, whenever vacancy yawned. He wrote of ‘enlargement of mind’. I read him to enlarge mine. Though I carried his words in my heart, I don’t remember everything he wrote. But I do remember what he didn’t say a University was a place for: -
Voicing mindless unanimity of conviction.
Policing thought, as in deplatforming, silencing, or otherwise restraining any fellow student or academic whose inquiries have led them to places where your inquiries don’t lead you.
Inculcating dogma.
Finding employment with the BBC.
Using words of which you don’t know the meaning.
Taking sides, and always the same side, in international disputes.
Setting up none-shall-pass camps on campuses to ensure there is no free circulation of thought.
Promulgation of ahistorical claptrap.
Activism of any stripe.
Demonstrating.
Social and racial engineering.
I had wanted to go to university ever since I learned there was such a place and the fact that I messed up being at an actual university didn’t turn me against the Idea of one. I was as rigorously taught as I’d expected to be - taught how to read, not what to read; taught how to think, not what to think. I wasn’t given a hard time; I gave myself one. University was an opportunity I didn’t know how to take. I was too young, too verdant, too uncertain, too abashed, too lonely, too easily hurt, too inferior in my own eyes. I felt everyone at my college had met at some earlier time, in some other place and were already good friends when I rolled up smoking Stuyvesants, trying to look like Jack Kerouac with a George Formby accent, albeit a George Formby who had absorbed the thoughts of John Henry Newman. I wrote ludicrously Lawrentian essays about ‘the living blood that throbs and throbs’ and even tried such language out conversationally on strange women I happened upon in tea shops. Looking back, I reckon I was lucky not to be arrested. . .
