Address by President McAleese 2010 Newman Lecture ‘Reimagining our Universities for the 21st Century
Address by President McAleese 2010 Newman Lecture ‘Reimagining our Universities for the 21st Century’ Newman House
Dia dhíbh a cháirde.
President, Chairman, Rev. Fathers, ladies and gentlemen, to deliver the 2010 Newman lecture in the month after Newman’s beatification is a particular honour and where could be more appropriate than here in Newman House, UCD, the successor institution to the Catholic University of Ireland, which first opened its doors in this very building on November 3rd, 1854. I thank President Hugh Brady for the kind invitation to be here with you this evening and for the most cordial welcome which he and his colleagues have afforded me.
In common with most universities of the time, Newman’s University was an elite, largely male establishment for the wealthy and no bigger than many second-level schools today. However, his backdrop was the convulsive industrial revolution and his legacy to us was a university which was to become UCD and a massive contributor to the political, social, economic and intellectual development of Ireland. It is entirely appropriate therefore to gather in his name during this the equally convulsive “knowledge revolution” and to contemplate, as he did, the role of the university in this century.
Newman, we know, was strongly sceptical of an approach to education that focussed exclusively on preparing people for the job market. He saw education as a means to cultivating the mind and, in particular, what he described as “the philosophical habit of mind” – a habit he believed had an intrinsic and fundamental value whatever one’s career choice or walk of life. Importantly, he saw it as a habit of broader reflection, a meta discipline which brought or sought a degree of order, harmony and reconciliation to a baffling world in which education was increasingly characterised by a plethora of disciplines and forensic differentiation within them, as well as external pressures to conform education solely to the prevailing needs of the market-place.
In Newman’s view, university was “the alma mater of the rising generation” and a place where “inquiry is pushed forward, and discoveries verified and perfected, and rashness rendered innocuous, and error exposed, by the collision of mind with mind, and knowledge with knowledge”. For Newman, the purpose of education was not to “…load the memory of the student with a mass of undigested knowledge” but instead to be able to perceive “many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence.”
Newman famously said that “to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” We have certainly changed a lot though obviously not yet enough to have attained anything close to perfection. UCD itself has lived through convulsive social and political changes pushing itself from modest origins to its contemporary status as one of the world’s leading universities. The secret of your success here has been precisely that ability to change and adapt to new realities. In fact, if we look at our university sector it has a resilience and adaptability that is almost unique when compared with other institutions and structures.
It will need all that strength and more to navigate the unmapped terrain of tomorrow’s world. While every generation has probably fancied that it alone has lived through the most complex of times, in truth the exponential growth of knowledge, and the means of its dissemination and analysis, is now squeezed into tight and testing timeframes as never before. As quickly as we are amazed by what we now know and what we can now do, we are confounded not alone by the realm of mystery that remains but by the unpredictability and caprice of things we thought we had mastered.
In our own time the unnoticed frailty of the building blocks of global economics and revered institutions that were household names for solidity and predictability has revealed itself to us rather alarmingly. Helping to fix those problems is now added to the list of challenges that face our universities for we look to you to educate and train the brain-power that is our most important natural resource, the key to problem-solving and the bridge to our progress and prosperity. We have a dependence on the intellectual lifting power, the ideas-generating power, the creativity and commitment of educated men and women. And we are fortunate that, more than in any other generation, we have huge numbers of school leavers entering third-level education, as well as a more educated population generally than at any time in the past. Their brainpower fuels the engine of our nation’s economy, our culture, our politics and our community life.
Ours is a sophisticated society and highly diversified economy that requires available cohorts of talent, skill and expertise in a wide range of areas that sweep broadly across the worlds of science, technology, the arts and humanities. From poets to nanotechnologists, from geneticists to theologians, from expertise in sign language to Chinese language, our universities are under pressure to ensure Ireland is ready for what the future will require. That Ireland is not the same place it was ten years ago. It is now home to people of many ethnic identities, languages and cultures. It is home to a computer-literate and instantly socially connected generation who will push pedagogical methodologies to new limits relentlessly. It is home to a challenging public who demand levels of professional competency and accountability that impact down the line on already crowded university curricula and a rapid-fire media that works to a considerably shorter analytical timeframe than the hallowed halls of academe.
As a global smart economy, we have a need for the competitive edge that comes from the innovation, research and development conducted in and through our universities, especially through their team work and national and international collaborations which nowadays promote multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary partnerships and require strong academic leadership as well as facilitating bureaucracies. There is an expectation that our universities as public service enterprises will engage directly with the contemporary needs of our society and, as sites of universal knowledge, will also be engaged globally in solving the bigger universal problems of disease, hunger, climate change, clean renewable energy to name just a few.
However, since our society is considerably more than an economy and our graduates much more than potential employees or employers, the Newman focus on an education that addresses the whole person, living fully and not just working in a complex universe remains a live issue. Few institutions know more about the problem-solving skills of the individual and the team than universities for universities are fuelled by the belief that, for all the avoidable and unavoidable fragility of our world, the curious, probing, interrogative intellect is capable of producing the solutions that help us transcend our problems.
Such a short time ago we seemed to have a roaring confidence about our national problem-solving capacity and, despite the ambient disappointment and economic retrenchment, it is important to acknowledge that we have much to be proud of, and reassured about, even in this glum time. No other generation has had such success in peace-building, in attracting high-quality foreign investment, in growing a strong entrepreneurial indigenous sector, in developing a high-end export economy that is currently doing very well, in globalising Irish culture and in strategically harnessing the energy of the global Irish family. These things eluded other generations and they remain centres of strength and gravity for us as we stabilise our economy and plough through these painful times to better times ahead.
There was a time when virtually all education involved a transfer of not just knowledge but wisdom and skill, when students did not labour alone in libraries but learnt their craft by trial and error, by practice and repetition direct from the experts with the intimacy of apprentices. Graduation was the beginning, just the beginning of experience and caution was more advisable than over-confidence. Numbers have now comprehensively overwhelmed that model of educational delivery. Yet recent experience has taught us that, along with encouraging confidence, entrepreneurialism and leadership, we also need to encourage prudence and risk awareness so that the common good is never compromised again by a blindness to consequences.
Are we capable of constructing a universal bulwark against the threat of recidivist foolhardiness? Will it be enough to construct such safeguards by official oversight and regulation of institutions and institutional practices without also addressing, at a much more intimate level, the everyday human bulwark constructed by the kind of common sensibility that comes from what Newman calls the “philosophical habit of mind” – a habit of mind that actively looks out for ways of thinking and doing that promote a holistic and integrated view of the individual, society and humanity.
Somehow it seems to me that before we can re-imagine our universities we have to re-imagine our society and our world for all of our universities are placed four square in the public space. They manage a plethora of relationships from those with the applicant student to Government, from alumnae to philanthropists, from professional bodies to representatives of industry and commerce, from their staff and trade unions to the media and the taxpayer. They have to teach, to research and to serve the cause of knowledge which is the cause of humanity. They have to face into problems that seem intractable and break them down so that they can become manageable. They have to manage scarce resources and try to do more with less. They have to manage the tensions between specialisation and meta-thinking, create opportunities for lifelong learning and on-line learning, contemplate the possibilities of the virtual university, create partnerships with competitors and, alongside their core education, provide high quality recreation, sports facilities and support services for students. How many workplaces are as complex as today’s and tomorrow’s university?
The 2nd Glion Declaration recognises that universities have an indispensable role in fostering innovation in the leaders of each new generation; it is in universities that “boundaries to our existing knowledge are explored and crossed; it is there that unfettered thinking can thrive and unconstrained intellectual partnerships can be created. It is there, within each new class, within each new generation that the future is forged.”
To me, this speaks powerfully to the role with regard to discovery of the 21st Century university. However Newman’s words are a reminder that universities will have responsibility, not just for creating and disseminating new knowledge, but for distilling the previous wisdom gained from both human failure and success into tools for the formation of tomorrow’s well-educated citizens. Universities have been the incubators of many life-enhancing ideas. They have been the platform from which has been launched the potential of individuals and nations. Without them, Ireland’s rapid jump from poverty to remarkable progress could not have happened. In them, we have precisely the institutions fit for the purpose of critiquing, analysing and interrogating the kind of re-imagined education they need to deliver – what Newman calls “the intercommunion of one and all”. If we are to effectively re-imagine the university for the 21st Century, our challenge is to carry out a creative and critical retrieval of those elements of Newman’s ideal that best align with our contemporary aspirations for economic stability, sustainable prosperity and social justice which is both local and global in its sensitivities.
In the poem “From the Canton of Expectation” Seamus Heaney describes the transformative power of widened educational opportunity which took a community that lived under “high, banked clouds of resignation” to “banked clouds edged more and more with thunderlight”. In the final lines he says something that could so easily be a plea for the educational integration, between the old wisdom, new knowledge, between the functional and the holistic, that Newman had the audacity to imagine and which could yet be our hope.
“I yearn for hammerblows on clinkered planks,
The uncompromised report of driven thole pins,
To know there is one among us who never swerved
From all his instincts told him was right action,
Who stood his ground in the indicative,
Whose boat will lift when the cloudburst happens.”
The development of an educated instinct for all that is “right action” sets a tough and controversial agenda. We have laws and a Constitution that shape the notion of what is right action. We have public criticism to mark the territory of what is wrong action. Our current context is a compelling and also disturbing mix of historic, outstanding, meteoric success and discouraging but hopefully passing disappointment. Our task is to build on all that was good in our success and to make our disappointments a springboard to re-imagine ourselves and our society.
We cannot do it without fresh thinking, by which I mean something beyond the superficial or anecdotal, which is always readily to hand with its morbid drumbeat but which may prove a false friend. We need the earnestness, the tried and trustedness of scholarship of the place dedicated to serious, forensic intellectual endeavour; the place Newman describes as “a seat of wisdom, a light of the world.” That place is the university where learning and unlearning go hand in hand, where there has been heresy and heterodoxy, partisanship and openness but where there has also been an uncanny ability to re-imagine itself effectively from generation to generation.
If our 21st century Irish universities can re-imagine themselves as successfully as they have done to date, then Ireland itself will be more than re-imagined - it will surely be reborn.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.