Okay, the title of today's conference is the Catholic intellectual and the challenge of the contemporary university.

I invite you in the following 45 minutes to consider John Henry Newman as an exemplar of the modern Catholic intellectual and his classic work, the idea of a university,

still a must read, I think, for every serious university student,

as a potent litmus test for contemporary universities.

Not only does this litmus test expose the considerable challenges

contemporary universities face. Rather, the litmus test Newman provides in his

classic work lays bare the very crisis of the modern university and identifies

what is in one way the cause and in another the effect of this crisis,

namely the university's counterfeit, which is the late modern mutation of the university into a polytechnicum with a liberal arts appendix.

Human's litmus test is based on a normative idea of what a university essentially is.

University is not simply a label that can be attached to whatever institution. Rather, it denotes essential features of a curriculum

and an institution of higher learning that is characterized

by fundamental metaphysical and epistemological commitments

across centuries and across cultures.

To put it in a nutshell,

according to Newman, a university properly conceived,

is founded on the unity of truth.

The unity of truth, in turn, accounts for the unity of knowledge,

at least for the possibility of the unity of knowledge.

And the unity of knowledge accounts for the unity of a university education,

at least for the possibility of the unity of a university education.

The discipline that inquires into the interrelationship of all sciences and hence into the unity of truth,

...