There is a kind of education that chills the soul. It operates with impressive order, produces well-timed outputs, and maintains impeccable discipline—yet something essential is missing. No spark leaps between minds, no encounter lingers after the lecture, no personal memory anchors the learning. The institution runs smoothly, but no one remembers why it began. It is, to borrow John Henry Newman’s words, “an arctic winter.”
In his 1854 Rise and Progress of Universities, written just as the Catholic University in Dublin was being founded, Newman reflects not on administrative charts or funding models but on the very soul of education: the tension between system and influence, between law and personality, between the structures that sustain knowledge and the human presence that breathes life into it.
He stages this reflection as a conversation with a skeptical friend who accuses him of overvaluing “persons” at the expense of structure. “After all,” the friend insists, “suppose there be an exclusive system, it does not much matter; a great institution, if well organized, moves of itself, independently of the accident of its particular functionaries.” Why place so much weight on professors, personalities, influence?
Newman’s reply is uncompromising:
“An academical system without the personal influence of teachers upon pupils is an arctic winter; it will create an ice-bound, petrified, cast-iron University, and nothing else.”
His argument is not merely rhetorical. He has known such places—where “teachers were cut off from the taught as by an insurmountable barrier,” where no real communion occurred outside of lecture or chapel, where “form took the place of earnestness,” and the professor, “with a pompous voice and cold condescension,” disdained even to know the private irregularities of the youth entrusted to his care.
Against this sterility, Newman champions influence—the deeply human transmission of knowledge from one soul to another, a teacher’s silent but shaping presence in a student’s intellectual and moral formation. “With influence there is life,” he writes, “without it there is none.”
Yet he does not oppose influence to structure. Instead, he seeks to harmonize them. Influence and law, he argues, are the two great powers that govern human affairs—“each has its own function, each is necessary for the other, and they ought to act together.” The tragedy comes when they are separated: law without influence freezes, influence without law dissolves.
To illustrate this dynamic, Newman turns to Athens and Rome—the two great cities of the classical mind. Athens, he writes, was “a ready-made University.” Its citizens pursued virtue “not from servile feeling . . . but because it was their nature . . . [It was] such a luxury to do it.” They regulated themselves by music and “danced through life.” Teaching there was not assigned or regulated—it happened as a matter of course, of culture, of spirit. “Merely to live among them,” Newman says, “was a cultivation of mind.”
And yet Athens failed—not because it lacked brilliance, but because it lacked order. “Influence was not enough without command.” Newman concludes that “in this world no one rules by mere love; if you are but amiable, you are no hero; to be powerful, you must be strong.” Athens may have inspired, but it could not govern. It needed Rome as a complement.
Rome, by contrast, mastered system. Its genius was for law and structure. “Establishment,” Newman writes, “is the very idea which the name of Imperial Rome suggests.” In the Church, this Roman spirit would later be embodied in the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—whose tightly organized educational model was so efficient, Newman notes, that “it can afford to crush individualities, however gifted.” While Athens moved hearts, Rome built institutions that could last.
Newman does not idealize either city. Instead, he sees their contrast as a lesson for any modern university: do not choose between law and influence—join them. “The personal influence of the teacher is able in some sort to dispense with an academical system,” he writes, “but the system cannot in any sort dispense with personal influence.” Personality is the seed; structure is the soil. One without the other either dies or never takes root.
What, then, makes a university live? Not merely libraries, timetables, or professorial chairs. “A whole class of teachers gradually arose,” he recalls, “unrecognised by its authorities . . . and gained the hearts and became the guides of the youthful generation.” This is the true heartbeat of the university: the unforced, often unofficial, influence of one soul upon another in pursuit of truth.
In our time—defined as it is by policy documents, digital platforms, and standardized metrics—Newman’s reminder is urgent. We may perfect the systems that deliver content, but if we neglect the persons who transmit conviction, we are building a frostbitten campus. Students today, like those in any age, still look “to the right and to the left, as sheep without a shepherd,” longing for a teacher whose influence is not contractual but personal, not procedural but formative.
Newman’s ideal is not nostalgic, but perennial. It is, as ever, the task of education to form not merely minds, but persons. And persons, as Newman knew better than most, are only ever formed by other persons.
“With influence there is life; without it, there is none.”
