The Best Book Ever Written on Higher Education

In the debate about what needs to be done to make university education more coherent and more effective, no figure is cited more frequently than John Henry Newman, whose classic study The Idea of a University (1873) tackles educational questions that still exercise would-be reformers. Some of those questions include: whether the governing principle of university education should be utilitarian or nonutilitarian; whether teaching or research should predominate in the hierarchy of university priorities; and what truly constitutes university education.