Watch The Replays Of The 2025 New College Lectures

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Overview

Universities are the second-oldest continuing institutions in the West. They began in medieval Christendom as religious foundations, but over the course of the last two centuries most have been transformed into purely secular institutions. This process was accompanied by the rise of the naturalistic sciences and the subsequent eclipse of the humanities, including theology. At the same time, the goals of religious and intellectual formation were replaced by more narrow, utilitarian understandings of the purposes of education. These lectures trace the profound historical changes that universities have undergone over the course of their long history and offer reflections on how that history is related to some of the challenges currently confronting our universities: the ‘crisis of the humanities’; the status of Indigenous knowledges; the dominance of instrumentalist understandings of education; and the increasing bureaucratization of university governance. Secularization, it turns out, is related to all of these in interesting ways that are often not well understood.

Event Program:

Lecture 1: Medieval Beginnings (Tuesday, 14th October)

This lecture explores the origins of universities in the eleventh-century Europe. It considers their models of governance, whether by student or scholar guilds, the content of the curriculum, and the organization of the faculties. While it is sometimes assumed that the primary function of the medieval universities was to teach theology, in fact the undergraduate curriculum was largely based on the philosophy of Aristotle and included natural philosophy (science). At times there were ‘turf wars’ between the faculties, and between the universities and ecclesiastical authorities, but the medieval universities enjoyed a considerable degree of independence. The question of the relation between Greek philosophy and Christian teachings shaped discussions of the relation of reason and faith, anticipating later discussions of the relations between science and religion and, more broadly, between naturalistic and religious understandings of the world.

Lecture 2: Naturalistic Science and the Secularisation of Knowledge (Wednesday, 15th October)

The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century is rightly regarded as a watershed in the Western intellectual tradition. Yet, for two centuries the new sciences, now separated from philosophy, remained marginal to the core business of universities. They lacked the status and epistemic prestige that they now enjoy. Only in the nineteenth century did science succeed in establishing a firm foothold in the universities, with Germany leading the way. This elevation of the sciences is informative for our understanding of the current relations between the sciences and the humanities and, more generally, of shifting perceptions of the mission of universities. This period also saw the secularization of the universities through the abolition of religious tests, the questioning of the status of theology, accompanied by the rise of a purely naturalistic outlook. Naturalism increasingly came to be understood as the appropriate form of academic neutrality and disinterestedness.

Lecture 3: Secularisation and Future of the University (Thursday, 16th October)

This lecture considers the question of how the processes of secularisation have shaped the modern university for good or ill, and explores how understanding those processes can shed light on some of the problems besetting the modern secular university. Consideration is given to Max Weber’s proposal that rationalisation, bureaucratisation, specialisation, the dominance of metrics, imperatives of mastery and control, and the sidelining of moral values, are all accompaniments of secularisation. These developments have had a profound impact on universities (and other modern institutions) even if we do not immediately associate them with secularisation. A further question is whether ‘secular’ is in fact a neutral, liberal, stance or whether it unwittingly promotes a systemic bias against certain legitimate activities and forms of knowledge. Secularisation, in short, turns out to be an important factor in thinking about the challenges confronting our universities, and for charting their future course.

About The Speaker:

Peter Harrison is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, and Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland. Before joining Notre Dame he was Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. From 2014-2019 he was an  Australian Laureate Fellow, and prior to this, the Idreos Professor of Science and Religion and Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre at the University of Oxford. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Yale, Princeton, Otago, and the University of Chicago, is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion, and a corresponding member of the International Academy of the History of Science. In 2011 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, and in 2019 gave the Bampton Lectures at the University of Oxford.