"Cardinal Newman, the Victorian Gentleman, and a New Idea of a University"

My essay considers Cardinal Newman’s "Idea of a University" (1858) as the ideological space where Victorian discourses on the gentleman and the reorganization of the educational system forcibly converge and conflate. As a first step, the main points of the question on education and the gentleman, highlighted in the seminal remarks of such “prophets” as Mill and Ruskin, Arnold and Smiles, are briefly discussed. Within this cultural frame, the essay attempts to investigate to what extent Newman’s discourses refashion contemporary notions in order to link the ideal of manliness with the academic world. In particular, the analysis focuses on Newman’s contribution to the process that, beginning from the Eighties, turned university education into the new standard for gentlemanliness, a property that could now be “manufactured”. By the end of the century, public schools and universities had grown into “factories for gentlemen”, marking the very end of the debate. At the same time, the stress Newman lays on the organic and dialectical relationship between knowledge and religion accounts for both the originality and the limit of his idea of a university, which will eventually sustain the secularization of higher education.