Newman’s influence lives on in the countless Catholic academics who have been inspired by his vision of the professorial vocation.
Editor’s Note: This story is part of the Register’s special report on “Legendary Professors.” Read the first stories here and here.
The Catholic Church’s canonized saints include many “legendary professors.” Among them is 19th-century English convert St. John Henry Newman, who pursued holiness as an Oxford tutor and founding rector of the Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin.
But Newman didn’t just provide a compelling Catholic witness of the professorial vocation. He arguably wrote the book on it.
In his seminal 1852 work, The Idea of a University, Newman placed educators at the heart of the university’s mission. The saintly scholar believed that the point of the university was the formation of its students’ intellects, a goal most potently achieved not through reading books, but through the “personal intercourse” between a student and his professors.
On this account, Newman saw university professors not as mere transmitters of information. Instead, he saw them as witnesses to the intellectual life, who formed the minds of their students through their personal influence.
The professor, wrote Newman, is “a missionary and a preacher,
