The humanities and the Irish university

Anomalies and opportunities

Michael O'Sullivan

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784995225
• eBook ISBN: 9781526112064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The first book-length study of the humanities and the Irish university

1

Introduction: defining the humanities

The phrase the ‘crisis in the humanities’ has been appearing in American academic circles at the very least since the founding of the Irish state in 1922. In that year, art historian Josef Strzygowski lectured in Boston on ‘The Crisis in the Humanities as Exemplified in the History of Art’, the same year James Joyce published Ulysses and changed the literary landscape of the humanities in Ireland forever (Bell, 2010:69). The humanities is, of course, a recognized disciplinary and institutional field in the Irish university system, but the humanities in the Irish context has not received anything like the critical interrogation or scholarly attention that the humanities enjoys in the American and British university systems.¹ This is despite the fact that Irish writers form an integral part of the literature curricula in these universities’ humanities divisions and despite the fact that the mission statement for a modern education in the humanities had perhaps its most eloquent expression in John Henry Newman’s founding series of talks for the Irish Catholic University. University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland’s largest university, was established ‘in direct succession from’ Newman’s Catholic University, and it regards Newman as its ‘founder’ (McCartney, 1999:145). On the centenary of Newman’s university in 1954, Michael Tierney, the then president of UCD, described UCD as ‘the harvest of Newman’s sowing’ (1955:146). However, despite this illustrious beginning, the nature and history of the humanities in the Irish university remains something of a mystery. Since speculation on the state of the university in general is very often sparked by reflection on the humanities subjects, there have been wider consequences. J. J. Lee argues that when the National University was founded in 1908, the ‘same deficiencies that ensured so little thought about Irish society in the universities themselves ensured equally little thought about universities in that society’; he argues that the ‘basic questions’ ‘remained not only unanswered, but largely unasked, at least until the 1950s’ with the result that the ‘higher education system is not in any real sense a system. It is bits and pieces of what might have been a system had the basic thinking been done in time’ (1989:621). In 1983, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Irish Universities Act, John Coolahan makes a similar point in writing that the 1908 University Act ‘left Ireland with three universities, each representing a different model. The University of Dublin had been modeled on the medieval Oxbridge tradition. Queen’s Belfast, could be seen as representing the modern non-residential, non-denominational university, while the National University was designed on the federal plan’ (1983:8). Despite government proposals to bring in new university legislation in 1968 and 1974, the 1908 Act was only revised in 1997.

Two of the key factors for the humanities subjects in the Irish university were the language and religion questions. Because the Irish education system at large and the early National University system struggled to find a place for religious enquiry and had to contend with a hostility towards the language of instruction by many leading educationalists, it is undeniable that key theological, philosophical and linguistic components of a general humanities education were omitted from the early humanities programmes in the National University. Since the foundations of any university system are important for what follows, this book argues that the humanities ethos in the Irish university in twentieth-century Ireland was slow to reflect on its educational scope and practices precisely because it was so painful to confront the residual political dimension of any institutional or philosophical change in regard to language and religion. As the century progressed, it was far easier to embrace new humanities and humanistic discourses such as the postcolonial and the post-structural – because these went against empire or gave the impression of cutting-edge research – than to confront key contradictions in educational policy and somewhat anomalous restrictions on practice and curricula in the humanities in the Irish university. This book will, therefore, examine some of the implications of these factors for a general humanities ethos as it was conceived in the Irish university and as it compares with the university education in the humanities subjects envisaged by writers and thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, John Henry Newman, Pádraig Pearse, Jacques Derrida and others.

Even though the focus of the book will be the National University because of the unique restrictions and conflicts at the heart of its humanities programmes, any such study is for many commentators by corollary a study of the influence of Trinity College on university life in Ireland. Following the second Presidents’ and Bishops’ Liaison Committee in 1952, Michael Tierney, the then president of UCD, sent a summary of what had been agreed at the committee meeting to the Archbishop of Armagh. He notes that ‘the National University, historically speaking, owes its origin to the insistence of Trinity College on its exclusively Protestant character’ (McCartney, 1999:190). R. F. Foster also describes the early Trinity College, a university that had already established James Ussher as its first Professor of Divinity in 1607, as the ‘intellectual foundation’ of the Church of Ireland (1989:49). Trinity College Dublin (TCD) was also largely unaffected by the 1908 Act which, I argue, was responsible for many of the anomalies in Irish humanities education throughout the century. However, the response to the 1908 Act was often fuelled by a sense that the resulting institution came up short when compared to what Trinity already offered the Protestant community. The subsequent ‘life’ of the National University, as embodied by its largest institution UCD, was also often measured against the performance of its illustrious neighbour, Trinity. The protracted debate on the failed merger between TCD and UCD, sparked by the establishment of the Commission on Higher Education in 1960 and only finally fizzling out in 1978 when UCD reluctantly accepted that business studies and social studies should be taught at both TCD and UCD, was in essence a debate that was ‘on and off the agenda since Gladstone’s University Bill of 1873’ (McCartney, 1999:343). Despite all the accusations and recriminations, these two sectarian institutions made similar claims for their Irish credentials. Hume Dudgeon, the then provost of Trinity College, wrote to Tierney in 1953 reiterating that Trinity was an ‘Irish institution’ with an ‘Irish atmosphere’ (McCartney, 1999:313), and the next year, Tierney argued that UCD was ‘one of Ireland’s largest windows on the world’ (1955:147). These competing perspectives on Irishness from the Irish ivory towers played out academically and in microcosm those recalcitrant sectarian cues that would shape the state’s future. Trinity loomed large in the background for the National University both as a template for how a modern university should be structured and as a reminder of what the Oxbridge tradition – a tradition it silently revered – embodied. Many Irish educationalists throughout the century such as Pearse and Hyde regarded the education system in Ireland that Trinity epitomized as ‘alien’ and they called for the education system to be ‘intellectually nationalized’ (in Kearney, 1987e:11).² The different structure of Trinity College is therefore a constant benchmark for this study even if it is at times a silent witness to the book’s focus on the humanities in the National University.

Chapters 2 and 3 examine the history and development of the humanities in the Irish university, focusing on key debates, constitutional questions and proposals on university education policy in Ireland that produced a somewhat anomalous situation for the humanities for much of the twentieth century. The work of Newman, the debate surrounding the 1908 University Act, and the educational ideas of Pádraig Pearse will be central to this discussion. Chapter 4 examines how key critical and cultural movements in the humanities subjects (focusing on perspectives from literary studies, philosophy and history)³ in the Irish university system have served to address some of these constitutional anomalies in the Irish education system. It explores the nature of the humanities in the Irish context since the 1930s by reading the work of leading international literary critics, cultural theorists, historians and philosophers who have described most clearly the cultural and political context of the humanities subjects they have studied and taught on in the Irish university. Chapters 5 and 6 contrast the humanities ethos in Ireland with leading cultural theorists’ descriptions of the humanities programmes in other university systems, such as those in the UK, France, the United States and Asia. Chapter 6 also examines the opportunities that have arisen in the humanities in Ireland since the 1990s through the foundation of such research bodies as the IRCHSS.

At the outset, it is also important to acknowledge the rich educational heritage of the island of Ireland. Douglas Hyde’s impassioned words of 1901 argue that ‘during the sixth, seventh, eighth, and perhaps ninth centuries Ireland had caught and held aloft the torch of learning in the lampadia of mankind, and procured for herself the honourable title of the island of saints and scholars’ (1901:214). Writing much later, Olaf Pedersen is less exuberant in noting that the ‘influence of Irish monastic learning on England came to be very important for the development of culture in Europe’ (1997:45). John Finnis reminds us that when Thomas Aquinas studied at the University of Naples, it was an ‘Irish professor’ who taught him Aristotle (1998:4), and Umberto Eco argues that the first ‘allusion’ to what he calls the ‘dream of a perfect language’ (1997:1) appears in an attempt made ‘on the part of Irish grammarians, to defend spoken Gaelic over learned Latin’. He points to the Gaelic work Auraicept na nÉces that, in discussing the Tower of Babel, makes the argument that ‘the Gaelic language constituted the first and only instance of a language that overcame the confusion of tongues’ (1997:16). Given this rich heritage in learning, it is important that the subjects that pass on the spirit of these early schools, today’s humanities subjects, be examined in the Irish context.

In a light-hearted article ‘Crisis, What Crisis? Rhetoric and Reality in Higher Education’, Malcolm Tight explains in 1994 that a ‘crisis’ culture has developed in post-war literature on higher education (1994:363–74). He lists ten books on British higher education and twenty books on American higher education that have crisis in the title that appeared between 1946 and 1994. However, rhetoric or no rhetoric, this clearly demonstrates that higher education and the humanities are under the spotlight in these countries in a way that is lacking in Ireland. Because the humanities is a branch of learning that evolves through self-questioning, such self-examination in terms of crisis is a vital part of its make-up. Geoffrey Galt Harpham has suggested that the ‘humanities flourish in flux, the extreme form of which is crisis. Humanists should understand their work, not as a set of professional practices unfortunately afflicted with crises, but as part of the way we think of and in crisis’ (2011:190). Louis Menand has also described this crisis in the humanities as a ‘crisis of rationale’ (in Harpham, 2011:22). This might lead one to believe that the Irish, in being quite adept at surviving crises, would have a privileged perspective on this vision of the humanities as the thinking of crisis. However, the way a community or a people survives and contemplates crisis is perhaps the most revealing marker of identity. Harpham’s equating of the humanities with crisis thinking itself may only lead to further questions about different kinds of ‘moral citizenship’, ‘national will’ (2011:168) and ‘national self-understanding’ (2011:147). This book will explore some reasons why the humanities have received relatively little attention in the Irish context and why the Irish experience and contemplation of crisis has been somewhat removed from the philosophy of the humanities in the Irish university.

Before I go any further, it will be helpful to devise a working definition of the humanities. There are four perspectives on the humanities that I wish to outline briefly here so that they will underpin the discussion of the humanities in the Irish context that follows. The earliest of these is one that has recently been re-examined by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine. Grafton and Jardine emphasize pedagogy, and in particular the pedagogical revolution inspired by the French humanist Petrus Ramus in the sixteenth century, in evaluating how the humanities emerged from humanism. They argue that in tracing the humanities back to Renaissance humanism, it is possible to point to a moment when humanism gave way to a modern notion of humanities. For Grafton and Jardine, the modern notion of the humanities was born when pedagogy in the Renaissance moved away from an ‘emphasis’ on ‘formal logic and the Theology Faculty towards Agricolan dialectic and eloquence’ (1986:163). What was known as the ‘new philosophy’ of the school of Agricola and Erasmus now makes utility its main criterion for success: ‘utility being taken to mean, productive of the kind of competence which will make an individual a responsible, moral and active member of the civic community’ (1986:163–4).⁴ The pedagogue whom they credit with inciting this transformation is the sixteenth-century French arts educationalist Petrus Ramus. Ramus ‘discarded the difficulty and rigour of high scholastic schooling and thereby attracted those who regarded education as a means to social position rather than as a preparation for a life of scholarship (or of theological debate)’ (1986:168). One might argue that we begin to see here elements of the crisis of conscience that have haunted the humanities ever since in terms of the debate over social utility versus learning for learning’s sake. However, if eloquence and the ability to ‘engage in polemic in the public arena’ have companion skills in the global university or in the ‘knowledge industry’, they are unlikely to be taught only in humanities departments. It is nevertheless clear that Ramus did raise the prospect that the ‘purpose of education was to purvey information and skills, not to be morally improving’ (1986:170). Newman’s Idea of a University, which I examine in chapter 3, also regards the humanities subjects that he wished to incorporate into his Catholic University in Dublin, what Ireland’s largest university UCD emerged from, as offering his students both utilitarian value and universal knowledge.⁵ The return to pedagogy in studies on the humanities raises the question of how important pedagogy has been for Irish academics in the humanities. Denis Donoghue is one renowned, Irish-educated literature professor who has related the ‘spirit’ of his discipline to teaching. I examine Donoghue’s work in more detail in chapter 4.

The second perspective on the humanities that is important for the discussion that follows is the Kantian examination of the humanities subjects in terms of a ‘conflict of the faculties’. I examine this more closely in relation to Jacques Derrida’s work on the university in chapter 5. However, it is an influential description of the university and it is worth restating here. Kant’s examination of philosophy and theology in the university was made following a very public reprimand and edict of censorship issued by King Frederick William II in 1794 in response to Kant’s work on religion. In Kant’s description of the university, there are three higher faculties (Theology, Medicine and Law) and one lower faculty (that of Philosophy that includes the humanities). Since the ‘government is interested primarily in means for securing the strongest and most lasting influence on the people’, the higher faculties are higher precisely because the ‘subjects which the higher faculties teach are just such means’ (1979:27). However, it is this close connection between the government and these faculties that necessitates that the faculty of philosophy, the lower faculty, be ‘independent of the government’s command with regard to its teachings’ so that it is ‘free to evaluate everything’ (Kant, 1979:27) by way of reason and to ‘speak out publicly’ in regard to ‘truth’ (Kant, 1979:29). It is the conflict between the theology and philosophy faculties, however, that is, for Kant, truly representative of the most fundamental work of the university. Kant argues that if the ‘source of sanctioned teaching is historical (and the Church’s espousal of doctrine in Irish society might be an example here), then – no matter how highly it may be commended as sacred to the unhesitating obedience of faith – the philosophy faculty is entitled and indeed obligated to investigate its origin with critical scrupulosity’ (1979:53–...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: defining the humanities
• 2 The humanities in the Irish context
• 3 Newman and the origins of the National University
• 4 The emergence of an Irish humanities ethos
• 5 International comparisons
• 6 The transformation of the humanities in Ireland
• Bibliography
• Index