Sir: Terence Kealey has made a valuable contribution in providing
evidence which exposes the fallacy in the argument — too often put forward by the DES — that the universities' liberal concept of education denigrates science and, even more, en- gineering, and thus must take a large part of the blame for the country's industrial decline. Kealey is correct in identifying Newman's The Idea of a University (1852) as providing a masterly exposition of the ideals of liberal education, but he is incor- rect in his implication that Newman thought technology was not good enough for academe.
This university is usually reckoned among the country's leading technological universities, yet last year its Academic Assembly approved a paper on the long- term future of the institution which saw the purpose of the University very much in the terms of Newman's liberal concept.
Only a superficial reading of Newman could give the impression that he wanted to produce the remote scholar, ignorant of technology and business, and incapable of contributing to either. Newman stoutly defends the usefulness of the trained intel- lect, and argued the benefit both to society and to the individual when 'the ex- perimentalist, the economist and the en- gineer' are educated within the university. As the mathematician and philosopher A. N. Whitehead wrote in 1932, 'The antithesis between technical and liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal.'
Thus the continuing challenge, which the Academic Assembly paper addressed, is to strive in technological disciplines to pro- vide an education which promotes the general powers of mind associated with the liberal ideal, and avoids a narrow utilita- rian vocationalism.
D. E. Packham
Chairman of Academic Assembly, School of Materials Science, The University, Bath, Somerset
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