Alma Mater?

An excellent short service of welcome for the new Ecumenical Chaplain (Andy Markey) to Oxford Brookes University yesterday included a concise expression of the university's hopes of the Chaplaincy from Mike Ratcliffe, the Director of Academic & Student Affairs. I was struck by his quotation from an 1854 volume of lectures by John Henry Newman on The Idea of a University in which he argues that a university training

aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspirations, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political powers, and refining the intercourse of private life.

I'm not sure I entirely understand all of that, or necessarily agree with it, but it's 'full of meat' to say the least. Although clearly 'of its time' it does present a challenge to contemporary universities which, in Newman's words, are in danger of becoming "a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill" rather than "an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one".