The idea of a Catholic University has been foremost in my mind in recent days. Catholic means “universal”, but what makes a university Catholic?
Greater intellects than mine have considered this question before. John Henry Newman — a saint of the Catholic Church and the patron saint of the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy at Australian Catholic University (ACU) — is perhaps the greatest among them.
Newman’s eloquent articulation of a universal Catholic liberal arts ideal claimed traditions from the Oxford of his happy youth.
He foresaw an institution which could explore harmonies but also probe tensions; which was committed to truth; which would dedicate itself to the pursuit of virtue and the celebration of Catholic culture; which embodied the simple love of learning; which harnessed both faith and reason in its wide-ranging engagement with those who lie beyond the reach of Church teachings.
As first rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, Newman developed and realised his vision for learning, enriching young lives and passionately defending the idea of knowledge for its own sake. All this was the science of humanity.
I have thought a great deal about Newman’s vision and its importance now that my own Catholic University told us it is to make devastating cuts to teaching and research staff, and to the University’s ability to engage in knowledge creation as Newman understood it.
Some 32 full-time humanities posts are being permanently disestablished.
Other staff will retire and will not be replaced.
More staff on temporary contracts will see those not renewed.
History and philosophy — core disciplines of the Catholic tradition — are the disciplines worst affected.
Theology, literature, political science, and sociology will suffer as well from these cuts.
The University claims that this is a critical moment when its academic model requires change to ensure it can meet long-term operational needs in an economically sustainable manner.
It says it wishes to align education and research better to its major thematic directions and operational needs. But it also just does not have the money.
ACU went from surpluses of over $30 million in 2020 and 2021 to a deficit of $8 million in 2022 and a forecast deficit exceeding $30 million for 2023. Critics might ask: where did the money go?
ACU says it no longer has the students or the revenues to sustain the interest in humanities fields it was investing in as recently as the start of 2023.
But the scale and speed of its retrenchment are scarcely precedented in the history of the humanities anywhere.
The effect on the lives of individual academic employees will be a hard cross to bear.
Many ACU staff moved heaven and earth to heed the University’s call to speak truth.
Some have been teaching here for years and are now forced to compete with cherished colleagues to retain their jobs.
Others left tenured positions in Britain, America, or other parts of Australia to join ACU. Only recently arrived, some will now be marooned on this island continent with no loved ones, little financial support, and no valid visa.
ACU brought over their possessions, but no one will foot the bill for their lonely return to a place of origin.
The moral tragedy of this situation is grave. It is a deplorable, heart-breaking situation which raises many questions.
Where did ACU lose its way?
Should not Newman’s vision have held even in the brave new world we find ourselves in?
A twenty-first-century Catholic University cannot always conform to his golden ideal.
It must work with the secular: with research metrics, performance indicators, funding requirements, and all the knowledge-creating bureaucracy’s other paraphernalia.
Those who have made decisions about our lives and futures repeatedly emphasise this.
Yet Newman’s vision recognised something which risks being lost in all this: the exceptional difficulty of quantifying truth’s value.
Is there a litmus test for validity of truth?
What even is a truth?
How is one truth to be separated from any other?
Is the authenticity of truth to be measured in terms of the number of pages needed to describe it or the frequency of its citation?
What of its impact factor or potential for commercialisation?
Only an unworldly ivory-tower dweller could remain self-cocooned from these questions. However, only a fool would deny that truth is not narrowly confined: it has a universality, a Catholicity.
At a practical level, truth must also be less abstract.
It must be found in the experiments scientists run, the accounts of the past historians give, arguments that philosophers reason.
A modern Catholic University must embrace all such modes of truth-telling which, properly constituted and understood, complement and inspire one another.
As Newman recognised, the Catholic University also needs to confidently embrace the daily concerns, perspectives, and languages — technical and everyday — of a wide world of stakeholders from across a global communion and academy.
ACU retains its Biblical and Early Christian Studies programmes and Theology and Religion.
It will spare a small number of history and political science posts in areas of perceived teaching “need”.
But a significant question remains: is this sufficient to fulfil Newman’s shining concept?
Will this lead to the impoverishment of Catholic intellectual life?
As yet incomplete research projects to be abandoned by the University, and perhaps lost to the world at large, include pioneering studies on the concept of home and problem of homelessness, on the origins of conspiracy theory, on transgender Australia and Queer Medievalism, on AI safety, and epistemic humility.
My colleagues work on understandings of gender, on stories of migration, on the entanglements of empire, and on ecologies of experience.
Such projects, disciplines, and those who pursue them, ought to be utterly central to Catholic intellectual life.
They search the innermost corners of hearts and consciences; they interrogate pasts known or unknown; they challenge perceptions of what we think we know about stories, artefacts, identities, ideas.
Charity, a primary Catholic virtue, should begin at home for the Catholic institution — and where better than through a detailed study of Catholic contributions to hospitality and treatment of the displaced and destitute?
Sexuality has been perhaps the area of the Church’s greatest influence on human behaviour and the human condition. Is it not entirely fitting — indeed, essential — that a Catholic University fosters deep engagement with the difficult questions which inevitably emerge from every manner of expression of human bodily desires?
What also of our relationships to generations past and future? To art and beauty? To our fragile earthly and celestial environments?
The list of questions that were being asked by these abandoned projects is sad and long.
My intrepid ACU colleagues have pursued truths in relation to such topics and such questions without fear or favour.
They have interrogated ideas that every Catholic must ponder every day and they have answered them in language that bridges the secular-spiritual and faith-reason divides.
I suspect some see these endeavours as a threat.
They are afraid of an inexact science in which conclusions cannot be quantified and are unappreciative of irreconcilable disagreements that nevertheless benefit from being aired. But such discomfort and disagreement are part of Catholicism’s universal, all-embracing identity.
As Catholics, we must all recognise that.
We must also recognise that Catholic education, especially one that benefits from the largesse of the state, is universal and for everybody. That means articulating truths in ways understandable to those of faith and those of none.
What will be lost? For what gain?
I grieve for what might have been.
And I fear there can be no optimistic chord on which to end this lament.
ACU is the second-ranked Catholic university in the Anglophone world in philosophy, and is tied for sixth-place in philosophy of religion (according to the Philosophical Gourmet Report).
Once ACU has gone down its chosen path, will it be able to recover, much less retain, its standing in the world of learning, nationally or internationally?
It seems doubtful.
Which scholar will henceforth want to settle in Australia to tell truths if it means giving up security for precarity?
Who will dare speak truth to power when that power may strip them of their livelihood in the blink of an eye?
- Miles Pattenden is, for the time being, Senior Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the Australian Catholic University.
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