New Centre Publication: Áine Mahon & Judith Harford, 'Job prospects, useful knowledge, and the ‘rip-off’ University: returning to John Henry Newman in our post-pandemic moment'
We're pleased to announce a new publication as part of our Newman Studies project:
Áine Mahon & Judith Harford (2024), 'Job prospects, useful knowledge, and the ‘rip-off’ University: returning to John Henry Newman in our post-pandemic moment'. Ethics and Education.
Abstract:
This paper re-examines the tension between professional and liberal education by revisitingThe Idea of the University(1852), the seminal mid-nineteenth century treatise of John Henry Newman. In returning to Newman’s classic text, we are interested in the significance of his lectures for a contemporary Higher Education increasingly under pressure to be ‘useful:’ on this understanding, ‘useful’ denotes an arguably limited and utilitarian sense where the university guarantees its students a well-paying job on graduation. In pressing on this distinction between ‘the useful’ and ‘the useless’ – a distinction that continues to plague discourse on the contemporary university – our paper focuses on the experiential and pedagogical aspects of education that find recurring emphasis in Newman’s classic work: aspects ofplace, of community, and of the teacher–student relationship.
Dr. Áine Mahon is Assistant Professor in the School of Education at UCD, a position she has held since September 2015. She researches and teaches in the Philosophy of Education and the Philosophy of Literature.
Prof. Judith Harford is Professor of Education at the School of Education, University College Dublin. Her research areas are history of education and education policy, with a particular focus on gender and social class.
