Walk a few short miles south-east of Oxford University, and you will come to the small parish of Littlemore. With a greater population of around 5,000, it is unassuming in every way except for its historical significance to the Catholic Church, and, by extension, Western civilisation and thought.
One hundred and eighty years ago, a resident Anglican preacher living in monastic conditions was admitted “into the Fold of Christ” by a travelling Passionist priest. That convert would leave Littlemore and later be sent to Ireland to found a Catholic university. His ambitions in doing so were captured in a series of landmark speeches, later published as The Idea of a University by John Henry Newman.
Almost two centuries later, on the other side of the world, in western Sydney, another figure is deeply concerned with the idea of a university and the proper role of higher education. Education Minister Jason Clare has shared many thoughts, policies, and even his own idea of a university, articulating how universities should look, operate, and function.
Clare is the incumbent overseer with an ambitious agenda that rivals the Dawkins reforms in significance and matches Whitlam’s appetite to enlist universities as vectors of equity. A senior member inside an ascendant government, he has the capital to effect far-reaching change. Clare’s idea of a university is informed partly by biography, reflects the profile of his constituency, and is nobly animated by social democratic instincts of fairness, access and economic equality. His idea of a university is the Australian Universities Accord, a road map for redesigning higher education.
Ten years ago, the Gonski blueprint for Australian schools posed many risks for the Catholic Mission. It was utilitarian in outlook with an immense resourcing tilt towards public education, coupled with a postmodernist curriculum.
A decade on, it’s Catholic schools that have emerged stronger than ever, with record enrolments, a successful assertion for a pluralist, knowledge-based curriculum that has space for faith-based instruction, and, importantly, are the first choice for a growing number of families.
Conquering Gonski took neither luck nor brute force, but precision and attention to the key tasks of regulatory design, advocacy, and engagement. However, that is only part of the story.
Successes were born from Divine reference, recalling the importance of the Mission, surrendering to God’s plan – not Caesar’s – and resolving never to genuflect to the zeitgeist.
Looking at the Accord, it’s clear that challenges similar to those we have faced with schools are being put to Catholic universities. These challenges will require university leaders to possess a similarly assertive fidelity to Catholic principles that can sustain identity and drive expansion amid secular pressures.
The Accord poses a fundamental question to all universities: how should an institution, funded and regulated by the Commonwealth, respond to the Accord’s policy agenda while still preserving its institutional identity? This question isn’t new, but the inputs and actors have changed.
Universities that uncritically accede to the full Accord agenda risk becoming pliant Benthamite institutions in service to the ruling masters of the day, soon to be unmoored from their founding principles.
This can’t be the Catholic response. Catholic universities have long been required to balance the demands of the secular world they inhabit with the call to Mission, observing faith traditions and guided by church teachings.
In the English-speaking world, it is impossible to look past Cardinal Newman when seeking inspiration to craft a response.
Newman had a similar task in his day, namely, to decide what a new university in Ireland should look like. Whereas Newman anticipated a vision for a new university in Ireland, we face the challenge of how existing Catholic universities in Australia balance the intensive demands of the Australian Universities Accord with the obligations of Ex Corde Ecclesiae.
The Australian Universities Accord is the product of a government-appointed panel that released its final report in 2024. The report contained forty-seven recommendations, most notably calling for a massive expansion of university enrolments; a reformed Gonski-esque funding model based on equity; and new governance arrangements that risk reducing university autonomy.
The Commonwealth has supported most of the Accord recommendations, albeit moving slowly on the more expensive items.
There is reason to be concerned about the direction the Accord is taking the sector. Aside from the fundamental risk that university autonomy is being reduced, the Accord and the government’s response to it appear to be imposing a utilitarian vision of universities on the sector, echoing Gonski’s vision for schooling in 2010.
There are also worrying risks associated with the Accord’s participation targets, such as students being admitted without adequate preparation and then dropping out or failing to find adequate job opportunities upon graduation.
What does all this mean for the future of Catholic universities?
It is not clear where many of the distinctive elements of Catholic universities would fit in the Accord’s more utilitarian vision.
A small yet illustrative example is the “core curriculum” of ACU and UNDA. While other Australian universities sometimes have a general education or “out-of-field” requirement, only the Catholic universities mandate a core curriculum, with a choice of units dealing with ethics, philosophy, and “the good life”.
ACU and UNDA encourage most students to take them in their first year, helping situate their specialised studies within a wider intellectual and ethical framework. It isn’t easy to reconcile the Accord approach with the Catholic core curriculum requirement, but it can be done.
Further, what of the pressing need to settle and implement an effective, symbiotic relationship between Catholic universities and local theologates? What says the Accord? Catholic administrators should have this answer ready before the question is asked.
In 1990, John Paul II gave us Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the current apostolic constitution on Catholic universities. At the time, many Catholic intellectuals regarded it as a disaster that would undermine academic freedom and reduce theological research to directed reasoning.
Some even feared that it was an instrument of the Inquisition, which would humiliate theologians and embolden the intellectual contempt in which the secular world held Catholic universities.
And yet, none of this came to pass.
Ex Corde Ecclesiae gives us a clear blueprint for a modern Catholic university. It cannot be run merely as a business operation. It cannot be a “teaching-only” institution (whatever Newman may have thought), nor can its strategic plan be required to dovetail into the Business Council of Australia’s blueprint for growth.
It must integrate knowledge and promote interdisciplinarity with the Catholic anthropology embedded in its theology, acting as an integrating force.
It must pursue social justice not as some personal or political conviction that one should do good, but as the message and imitation of Christ that underlies Christian anthropology; here, the reference must be to Catholic social teaching, not fashionable NGO slogans.
Newman confronted a particular set of challenges for higher education in the nineteenth century. In the twenty-first century, we need to be prepared to do the same. How should major faith-based enterprises, be they in health or education, respond when faced with the twin challenges of assertive secularism and hostile regulation while still giving full expression to their Catholic identity?
The question is being asked more frequently as, across the world, the proper role of educational institutions is being challenged from within by disruptive reformers and from without by government authorities seeking to assert civic or state-led visions of schools and universities, where there would previously have been deference to religion in matters of education.
These are real challenges, but we have the resources to address them, and nearly a decade of waging this battle in schooling has convinced me that it can be done as well as looking at successes in Catholic Health.
At the university level, the challenge is right in front of us: the competing demands of the Accord and those of Ex Corde Ecclesiae. The response will define Catholic university life in Australia for several generations, so we need to start having serious conversations that begin with acknowledging the challenge and being resolute.
Those of us committed to the future of Catholic education in Australia cannot lose sight of three sets of demands upon us: management, education, and Mission. We cannot afford to prioritise any one of these to the exclusion of the others. Success in educational leadership today means balancing these competing challenges.
We need to get ready. After more than a decade of Gonski school funding debates and curriculum wars, the Commonwealth’s full attention has now shifted to the university sector, poised to assert government into university stewardship via the Accord.
The risk for Catholic institutions is more acute, as their response must take in additional considerations: how to satisfy government requirements while preserving and honouring ecclesial traditions.
The response isn’t a task, but a duty; see the Accord not as a threat but as an opportunity; don’t bother with a work plan, but a contemporary distillation of church and civil obligations reflecting the rich inheritance of our intellectual traditions.
It will need seriously committed discipleship on the part of our leaders; our history calls us to this challenge.
