Melbourne News

2012 Newman Public Lecture at Mannix College

Friday 17 August 2012

By Dr Simon Caterson

PROFESSOR Ed Byrne AO, Vice-Chancellor and President of Monash University, delivered the annual Newman Public Lecture at Mannix College early this week on the topic of 'Universities in 2025: What Newman got right and what he got wrong."

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According to Professor Ed Byrne AO, Vice-Chancellor and President of Monash University, Australia’s largest and the world’s most international university, the true significance of Newman’s idea of a university emerges only when his thought is viewed properly in the context of his life and times.

Delivering the annual Newman Public Lecture at Mannix College, a Catholic residential college affiliated with Monash, to an audience that included Bishop Peter Elliott and the Chancellor of Monash University, Dr Alan Finkel AM, Professor Byrne described the past, present, and increasingly globalised future of higher education by invoking a figure he sees as firmly rooted in England in the nineteenth century. 

“The title of this lecture is very much tongue in cheek. It is no more sensible to ask what Newman got right and wrong about higher education than it is to bring Newton to book for his poor grasp of quantum physics,” Professor Byrne explained. 

Professor Byrne described the phenomenal expansion of knowledge in our time, which Newman in his era could not have anticipated, by reference to his own experience as a researcher.  “When I trained as a neurobiologist it was possible for a competent clinician to have good expertise in all fields of neurology.  Years later, when my career came to an end, it was an effort to be completely across even one sub-field such as the neuro-muscular area.”

In relation to his philosophy of educating the whole person, Newman remained timeless and universal, said Professor Byrne. “Newman’s advocacy of a liberal education was born of a belief that the cultivation of the mind was the highest calling. He considered it a worthy object for its own sake. So do we.”
 
Dr Simon Caterson is Senior Tutor and Librarian at Mannix College.

Photos by Peter Firus/Mannix College. Copyright 2012.