Hanna Holborn Gray on searching for Utopia in our universities

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Hanna Holborn Gray on searching for Utopia in our universities

Feb 2010

Speakers: Hanna Holborn Gray

Hannah Holborn Gray examines the themes of an ideal education and an ideal university, how they have changed over time, and how they affect the debates over the structures and purposes of liberal learning.

Gray begins with Cardinal Newman's The Idea of University (1853), and describes the study of the concepts of universities. She explains how universities began as religious institutions in the medieval period, and how their focus changed with the advent of the Renaissance, from the teaching of accepted 'truths', to the desire to question them. The collegiate model was challenged in the twentieth century with profound consequences – the authority of the past gave way to the authority of science, the expansion of subjects offered by universities greatly increased, and, in the second half of the century, universities became a breeding ground for activism. Moving to the modern period, Gray argues that, with the increasing vocationalisation and specialisation of universities, the liberal arts in their broadest sense are becoming increasingly valuable in their fidelity to intellectual cultivation and scholarship.

Thank you to the University of California Television for making this video available.