„The pope is about to visit England, and is expected during the visit to announce the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman, the scholar, priest, and poet, who left the Anglican for the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, and who was to become the most important Catholic intellectual of his time. From 1854, for a period of five years, Newman was rector of the newly founded Catholic University of Ireland (now University College Dublin), and during that time he delivered lectures that were later published as The Idea of a University -- surely the most serene and beautiful vindication that we have of the old ideal of the scholarly life. (...)
I suspect that many middle-class parents, when it comes to deciding on their teenage children's future, entertain a picture of university life that is not entirely at odds with that painted by Newman. They will recognize the gap between Newman's ideal and the imperfect realities. But they will recognize that this gap does not necessarily represent a decline. Universities now admit women, and try as best they can to offer their benefits to people in all walks of life and regardless of personal connections or social class. Those changes will count, in most eyes, as improvements. And the resources available to a modern university are many factors greater than those enjoyed by the university described by Newman, which had next to nothing in the way of lecture halls, book-lending facilities, concert halls, and places of recreation.
The middle-class father, preparing to meet tuition fees of $40,000 or more, and board and lodging on top of that, will naturally dwell on all the ways in which this represents a good investment. But when his daughter emerges three or four years later with a degree in Women's Studies, the main outward sign of which is a well-honed grievance against men in general and the last one in particular, he is likely to question the wisdom of throwing away a third of a million dollars on such an outcome. Finding that his daughter's ignorance of the classics is as great on leaving university as it was on entering it, that she has graduated from her teenage pop idols only to immerse herself in more »advanced« forms of rock and heavy metal, and that her attitude to career, marriage, childbearing, and all the other things that he had hoped for her is entirely negative, such a father is sure to regret the use of his money.”
