If Church Foundation identity has any meaningful content, and contribution to the whole, then surely its value should reveal itself in the core purpose of the University: in its understanding of education and research. If its Church Foundation character is predicated simply on the addition of Anglican (Christian) trimmings and options to an understanding of education that could belong and be sustained anywhere, then such an identity would possess an uncomfortable degree of redundancy.
In a Church Foundation, therefore, chaplaincy cannot be a mere adjunct to the ‘real’ business. Rather, as Monica Manning (2007) proposes, chaplaincy can contribute to the work of recalling the University back to its highest vocation (p.259).
An unexpected, yet potentially fruitful, place to begin here is with Robert Pirsig and his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ([1974], 1991). In his extended Chautauqua one of the topics he examines is the university as ‘The Church of Reason’ (pp.147-153). A church is not defined by its building, so that a deconsecrated church could just as well function as a bar or a nightclub. Rather a church exists wherever a definitive practice takes place; wherever, we might add, Jesus is proclaimed and celebrated as Lord. In just this way a university is not defined by its buildings, or its pattern of organisation, but by a definitive practice; it is a site of reason. If the practice of independent, critical reason is lost or undermined, then though a university may continue to have students, lecturers, a library and examinations, it has ceased to be a university.
We need not accept Pirsig’s suggestion of the defining activity of a university to make use of his analogy. Indeed part of the point of the book is that Pirsig himself is dissatisfied with the prevailing account of reason and its separation from emotion, art and inspiration. Rather he provides us with a valuable question: What practice, or set of practices, defines a university without which it has lost its calling?
Part of the point of having chaplains, whether or not they have opportunity to directly participate in the formal teaching and research of the university, is because they enact, through chapel worship and attendant activities, a model of educational endeavour. To this extent then they are what we might term ‘organic participants’ in the university. The defining activity they exemplify might be very briefly summarised as:
- A transformative pursuit of truth;
- Forming persons as well as inculcating knowledge and skills;
- Having an irreducible relationship to the transcendent: to what lies beyond the horizon of immediate experience or already-accepted understanding.
The purpose of a university, we might say, is inherently theological – it is to quest for what counts as true, for what counts as real beyond particular ideological accounts of reality. In this process it is to discern what is worthy of admiration, what is worthy of preserving and so worth handing on (c.f. Collini, 2012). Education serves the purpose of increasing the transparency of the world to our understanding by making our thinking more permeable to what lies both beyond us and within us. Thus education serves the purpose of learning how to live in relation to all that is perceived (not merely learning how to make a living). While not itself being redemptive, education can thus become a sign of, a preparation for, and an invitation to participation in the loving exchange of the trinitarian life of God.
While an explicitly theological vision of the purpose of education such as this may well remain the possession of the minority, it can be used, with care and tact, as the catalyst around which to build a consensus concerning where current educational practice falls shy of the mark. Thus while the positive motivation for this vision may be contested, many, perhaps most, of its implied consequences will readily be accepted and welcomed by those who feel that the current economically dominated climate is doing damage to the integrity of universities. This has certainly been my experience over the last twenty years of staff common room discussions.
John Sullivan (2007) points to the way in which education has too often had to assume a form of training which privileges “prescription, predictability, fragmentation into manageable parts, measurement, regulation – and docility…” (p.93). This is hardly an environment in which the ‘big questions’ of identity, hopes, fears, purpose and meaning can be encouraged. And if such an attenuation of purpose has come about in an attempt to harness more closely what universities do for securing the wealth and prosperity of the nation, then, as Stefan Collini (2012) sharply observes, we still need to ask: what is wealth good for? Unless an answer can be given that escapes economic terms we shall be doomed to an unthinking circularity.
At a time when universities are being reduced to conglomerates of diverse but separate training schools, when there is a breakdown in the sharing, communication and mutual conditioning of the questions that each academic discipline pursues, then the question of what defines a university has never been more relevant. At such a moment the chaplain’s suggestion that it must be something more than a matter of sheer economic scale will receive a warm reception. At such a time there is also value in listening out for and supporting other ‘maverick’ voices that are prepared to speak against the current grain and challenge the university to live up to its highest values. Such voices are not always the most obvious of initial allies!
No thoughts yet on “Enacting the core purpose”