A collection of articles by St. John Henry Newman, published in magazines and newspapers, about the university education in a difficult time.
Newman was appointed the first rector of the new Catholic University of Dublin, an episcopal and papal commitment to establish a Catholic education in an Ireland that had only Trinity College, an Anglican education.
The writing of St. John H. Newman is not easy, it is full of historical trajectories and continually draws from classical and medieval sources, especially Greece. However, among so many historical disquisitions and search for the source, he reconstructs the meaning of the university education. An idea that runs through the whole book: what is important is not to build a university, what is definitive is not to have a building, what is really interesting is to have models of life that attract and stimulate students, what Newman calls the principle of personal influence. The transmission of the faith, evangelization, does not depend so much on high reasoning as on personal influence. For this reason, Newman considers himself an advocate of the "colleges", in the Anglo-Saxon model, because "the university is for the professor and the college, for the tutor; the university is for philosophical discourse, the elaborate sermon or the well-refuted disagreement; and the college is for the catechetical lesson [...] for the formation of character, intellectual and moral, for the cultivation of the spirit, for the formation of the mind, for the development of the mind and the spirit of the student, for the formation of the mind and the spirit of the student".