WHAT WOULD DR. NEWMAN SAY TODAY? (THE IDEA OF A. .. COLLEGE?)

John Henry Newman's The Idea of a University, if not exactly the proverbial bedtime reading, has been a recurrent and inspirational reading of mine for a good 45 years. His lecture, "Christianity and Scientific Investigation," is a masterpiece, and when I need to get my bearings for thinking liberal education thoughts amid the con troversies in American higher education, then Discourses III, IV, V, and VII always assist me in doing just that. But there is also the haunting and disturbing thought: after all, these essays come from the middle of the nineteenth century! If not Utopian, are they not archaic? Don't they represent something of a paradise lost? (It is true that listeners' eyes tend to glaze over when I make use of Newman in a presentation.) There is also a series of noisy objections to Newman's recom mendations based on the undeniable facts that he wrote at a time