What is a university for?

Universities have changed dramatically over the course of my lifetime—a lifetime which has included 9 years as a student and 32 years as an academic, across 6 universities in Australia and the USA. Australian universities are receiving increasing media attention due to failures in management and governance, including a recent ABC Four Corners documentary.  Numerous books by academics lament the state of Australian universities.  They appear to be all about four M's: money, marketing, management, and metrics. Learning, understanding, and discovery for its own sake seems alien and marginalised. Questions that need more attention include What is a university for? and What values should a university embody? In the New College Lectures for 2025 Peter Harrison went much deeper than the public debates and considered the role of secularisation, values, and virtues. 

The beginning of an article I wrote and will appear in the next issue of the CASE Quarterly.

What is a university for? A Christian Vision for the Modern Secular University 

How might order and disorder shape scholarship?

 Order and Disorder: Nigel Biggar in Dialogue with the University, Edited By Terence C. Halliday and K. K. Yeo

has just been published by Langham.

In 1992, John Stott, the founder of Langham, made an “urgent plea for double listening” for Christians to listen to both the Word and the world. This book is a notable response to Stott’s plea, in the context of the highest levels of academia. There is an intellectual chasm between academic theology and the research that takes place in secular universities, even though the best ones have deeply Christian origins.

In this volume, Professor Nigel Biggar claims that the “existence of a given created order – be it physical or aesthetic or moral – implies that academic endeavour is properly about the discovery of the truth of reality as given by God.” However, given human finitude and fallibility, finding such truth is subtle, complex, multi-faceted, and ambiguous. Elucidating the nature and extent of the connections between theology and academic disciplines is a formidable multi-disciplinary challenge that must contend with overspecialisation, compartmentalisation, secularisation, institutional inertia, and political polarisation.

The Global Faculty Initiative (GFI) has developed a community and method that provides small concrete examples of how to make progress. Thanks be to God! This book is the wonderful fruit of their concerted labour and is the second in a series showcasing the work of GFI. Biggar provides a Theology Brief that elucidates the conceptual dialectic of order and disorder in creation to set the contour of a dialogue with Christian scholars from diverse academic disciplines. His Brief is succinct, accessible, balanced, profound, helpful, stimulating, and relevant. The responses are creative, concrete, stimulating, and gracious in disagreement and correction. Biggar’s final response is noteworthy: “We all learn from what should be a genuine dialogue. We all need to learn – non-theologians to think more Christianly, and theologians to think more realistically.”

Upon engaging with the book, my main disappointment was that I did not somehow make the time to contribute to the discussion. My own field of condensed matter physics is largely about how the interplay of order and disorder can lead to the emergence of hierarchical structures. Nevertheless, the book is a stimulus for future engagement with the ideas presented and with this vibrant alternative academic community.